It's worth noting that a lot of the soy from deforested areas also goes towards feeding livestock. The soy that humans eat (or drink) tends to be more more ethical on average.
Most of the food animals eat is not human-grade, and a big part of it are by products of food for human consumption it would not be used anyways.
Food grown in deforested rainforests often isn't human grade because, stripped of the natural forest ecosystem, the land often doesn't have the nutrients to support high-quality agriculture. Don't you think pretty awful that we destroy some of natures most important ecosystems to make room for poor quality agricultural land?
1. Deforest land, for some purpose at most tangentially related to agriculture (presumably to use the wood)
2. Land becomes fairly useless; find most productive usage possible
3. Animal agriculture / grazing fields
That is, I doubt land is being specifically destroyed for this purpose -- there's enough available land to simply use as-is... unless it's already been destroyed as a byproduct of other activity.
Not really, though - the GP link says it takes 50 calories of feed to make 1 calorie of Beef, so eating the feed directly would require 50 times less land.
Exact. Soy monocultures are devastating for environment, is an evil league respect to pastures, that still hold thousands of species. Soy fields have one species for Km and Km. Period.
Soy is often grown in deforested rainforest areas too. But as a sibling comment says, only 6% of soy goes towards direct human consumption. The rest is for animal feed.