Cross-country empirical evidence on the effects of agricultural technological change on cropland use is surprisingly scarce. Such a lack of evidence has given way to polarized views on the potential of technological progress to slow down deforestation. To fill this gap, this paper develops and estimates a model that links the changes in a country's cropland to changes in both domestic and foreign total factor productivity (TFP). We find that in most countries of the world TFP growth is either uncorrelated or positively associated with cropland expansion. Yet worldwide patterns of TFP growth have been an important source of global land savings. The divergence between country-level and global results is explained by the changes in production patterns as countries interact in international markets. A simple, back of the envelope calculation suggests that in the absence of TFP growth, global land expansion during 1991-2010 would have been twice as large as observed.