Matters Arising

Published: 29 April 2026

Nature

volume 652 , pages E11–E13 ( 2026 ) Cite this article

Subjects

arising from: R. A. Wiebe & D. S. Wilcove. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08569-5 (2025).

Wiebe and Wilcove 1 provide an important and timely analysis on how outsourced deforestation causes biodiversity loss. Yet, we are concerned that their analysis wrongly attributes forest loss through shifting cultivation to international commodity trade, leading to erroneous conclusions on where developed countries inflict harm on vertebrates in distant countries. We illustrate this using their own key example, vanilla exports from Madagascar, which we show is not responsible for species’ range losses, building on substantial evidence on shifting cultivation and commodity cropping in Madagascar.…