President Donald Trump stood on the Truman Balcony at the White House during the “Great American Agriculture Celebration” last week and announced what he called a “historic” boost to the nation’s farmers.

The Environmental Protection Agency, Trump said, would require the highest-ever volume of crop-based biofuels to be blended into the nation’s gasoline supply, a move the administration promises will bring jobs and cashflow to an agriculture industry feeling the twin punches of the president’s tariffs and higher fertilizer prices linked to the war in Iran. Trump called himself a “true friend and champion” of the country’s farmers, a key political constituency that he is again actively and festively courting.

But some analysts and researchers say the administration’s plan has a critical flaw: The U.S. doesn’t produce enough vegetable oil to satisfy the demands of the new blending targets. That means it will have to import more foreign vegetable oil, which will imperil climate-critical tropical forests thousands of miles away as they’re cleared to grow more oil crops.

Beyond these negative climate impacts, the new targets will actually drive diesel prices higher, by 30 cents per gallon this year and 36 cents per gallon in 2027, according to the EPA.

“This particular rule, by EPA’s own analysis, will cost about $20 billion over the two years that it’s in effect,” said Dan Lashof, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. “And rather than having any environmental benefits, it will actually drive deforestation and increased emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide.”

The world’s vegetable oil markets are highly interlinked. If vegetable oil is diverted from food to fuel uses, oil for food will have to come from somewhere else, potentially regions where carbon-rich tropical forests are cleared to produce soybeans and palm oil.

Jeremy Martin, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says that bio-based diesel consumption in the U.S. has shot up in recent years. Imported vegetable oils and animal fats met about 70 percent of that demand.

The EPA set the biofuels volumes for 2026 and 2027 at about 27 billion gallons, with 15 billion from corn-based ethanol—the same amount as in previous years. But the new mandate calls for a 60 percent increase in biomass-based diesel, including vegetable-based and renewable diesel, over 2025, or about 9 billion gallons.

“That 60 percent increase is massive,” Martin said. “That’s going to be a huge shock to the U.S. and global markets for vegetable oil and fat.”

Martin pointed to recent research from Aaron Smith at the University of California, Berkeley, showing that global demand for biomass-based diesel between 2002 and 2018 drove deforestation across more than 4 million acres in Southeast Asia, releasing more than one gigaton of carbon dioxide. That conversion means biomass-based diesel actually has higher carbon emissions than fossil-fuel-based diesel.

“Increasing the use of vegetable oil for fuel has dramatic consequences for deforestation,” Martin said. “There’s not 60 percent more vegetable oil available in the United States for fuel, so if it’s going to increase that much, it’s going to have a dramatic impact on the balance of trade and that will lead the U.S. to import more vegetable oil.”

Paul Winters, a spokesman for Clean Fuels Alliance America, the country’s biggest biodiesel trade group, said the EPA examined Martin’s claim and “concluded that North American feedstock supplies are not a limiting factor in meeting the final RFS volumes.”

“The strong U.S. market for biodiesel and renewable diesel is needed to ensure that farming – production of food, animal feed, and other agricultural goods – remains economically viable,” Winters added.

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U.S. producers are currently sitting on a glut of unsold soybeans—largely because China, the largest buyer, has turned to Latin America in response to Trump’s trade tariffs last year. But it will take years to ramp up production capacity for turning those soybeans into oil.

Palm oil, which is produced largely in Malaysia and Indonesia and used mostly for food and cosmetics, is not eligible under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard or in the European Union because its cultivation has led to so much deforestation.

“But because the rule would drive increased demand for soybean oil, it will drive up prices for all vegetable oils, which are highly correlated,” Lashof said. “The problem is that, in the meantime, other vegetable oils are being used to make biofuel, and then palm oil is used to backfill that oil in the food markets. … They’re very tightly linked as substitutes in the international market.”

The EU recently said that, as with palm oil, it would no longer allow soy-based biofuels to count toward its renewable fuel mandates because of the high risks they pose to deforestation and land-use conversion. In its evaluation of the new rule, EU regulators said “the expansion of the palm oil and soybeans production area into high-carbon stock land is so significant that the greenhouse gas emissions that result from land use change offset all greenhouse gas emission savings of fuels originating from this feedstock, when compared to the use of fossil fuels.”

The U.S. is going in the exact opposite direction.

Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University who has long questioned the emissions benefits of biofuels, called the new EPA mandates “very bad for the climate and nature.”

“Every gallon of increased U.S. biodiesel results in almost exactly a gallon increase in imports of vegetable oil,” he explained. “The sources of new vegetable oil in the world are primarily oil palm expansion into tropical forests in Southeast Asia and increasing[ly] Africa and Latin America, and soybean expansion in Latin America.”

Biodiesel expansion alone likely will drive more than 7 million acres of tropical deforestation, Searchinger explained, resulting in greenhouse gas emissions “over 30 years that are three to four times the reductions in fossil emissions from diesel.”

Winters, of Clean Fuels Alliance America, dismissed data behind indirect land use change.

“Environmentalists who promote the theory of indirect land use change [ILUC] have been thoroughly unsuccessful in preventing deforestation over the past several decades,” Winters wrote in an email. “National and state-level policies to preserve existing forests are the only mechanism that will work. The level of uncertainty and unreliability in ILUC models is astounding and outcomes are entirely dependent on assumptions.”