Rapid growth in agricultural trade: effects on global area efficiency and the role of management

By Thomas Kastner, K. Erb, H. Haberl. 2014

252 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cropland is crucial for supplying humans with biomass products, above all, food. Globalization has led to soaring volumes of international trade, resulting in strongly increasing distances between the locations where land use takes place and where the products are consumed. Based on a dataset that allows tracing the flows of almost 450 crop and livestock products and consistently allocating them to cropland areas in over 200 nations, we analyze this rapidly growing spatial disconnect between production and consumption for the period from 1986 to 2009. At the global level, land for export production grew rapidly (by about 100 Mha), while land supplying crops for direct domestic use remained virtually unchanged. We show that international trade on average flows from high-yield to low-yield regions: compared to a hypothetical no-trade counterfactual that assumes equal consumption and yield levels, trade lowered global cropland demand by almost 90 Mha in 2008 (3-year mean). An analysis using yield gap data (which quantify the distance of prevailing yields to those attainable through the best currently available production techniques) revealed that differences in land management and in natural endowments contribute almost equally to the yield differences between exporting and importing nations. A comparison of the effect of yield differences between exporting and importing regions with the potential of closing yield gaps suggests that increasing yields holds greater potentials for reducing future cropland demand than increasing and adjusting trade volumes based on differences in current land productivity.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/19cf86743f09ae5f7ce61e509c3d09f1d3c67b07

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

Citations in the corpus

Cropland area embodied in international trade: Contradictory results from different approaches (2014, background): “Kastner et al. / Ecological Economics xxx (2013) xxx–xxx”
Human appropriation of land for food: The role of diet (2016, background): “…in agricultural use and increasing food yields, especially crops (e.g. closing the ‘yield gap’ or 43 ‘sustainable intensification’) (Foley et al., 2011; Kastner et al., 2014; Mueller et al., 2012; West et al., 44 2014); or the potential benefits and trade-offs associated with increasing livestock…”
Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange: Implications for sustainability in the 21st century (2021, background): “International trade volumes have grown rapidly (Kastner et al., 2014; Wood et al., 2018) as domestic requirements for materials, energy, land, and labor have increasingly been met by drawing on non-domestic sources (Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018; Wiedmann et al., 2015).”
Over the hills and further away from coast: global geospatial patterns of human and environment over the 20th–21st centuries (2016, result): “This is in line with the rapidly increased global trade (Hoekstra andHung 2005, Yang et al 2006, Fader et al 2013, Kastner et al 2014) and growing dependency on trade to ensure national food supply across the globe (Porkka et al 2013, Kummu et al 2014).”
The Global Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus (2018, background): “, 2012), and land (Kastner et al., 2014) that are embodied in the production of traded commodities.”
Middle-range theories of land system change (2018, background): “Spillover theories could also better integrate environmental processes such as Earth system teleconnections from land-use changes to distant regions via changes in rainfall regimes (Keys et al., 2017), spillovers between biodiversity and ecosystem services (Maestre Andrés et al.”
The Emerging Soybean Production Frontier in Southern Africa: Conservation Challenges and the Role of South‐South Telecouplings (2016, background): “Telecouplings have predominantly been conceptualized as linking developed “consumer” and less-developed “producer” regions, through biomass flows (e.g., Kastner et al. 2014).”
Comparing the sustainability of local and global food products in Europe (2017, unknown): “The impact is similar for land use: a shift to local production would increase worldwide agricultural land use because of yield differences (Kastner et al., 2014).”