The Emerging Soybean Production Frontier in Southern Africa: Conservation Challenges and the Role of South‐South Telecouplings

By Néstor Ignacio Gasparri, Tobias Kuemmerle, Patrick Meyfroidt, Y. Waroux, H. Kreft. 2016

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soybean expansion has been a strong driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss in South America (SAM). Here, we highlight strong similarities in environmental, institutional, and other contextual conditions among SAM and Southern African (SAFR) dry forest and savanna regions, and compile evidence for an emerging soybean production frontier in SAFR. Knowledge transfer, cooperation, and direct investment between SAM and SAFR countries constitute crucial elements of soybean expansion in Africa. Comparing maps of soybean suitability, biodiversity, and carbon revealed substantial and spatially diverse trade‐offs, suggesting that the emerging soybean frontier in SAFR may poses major challenges for conservation. An increased focus of conservation science on agricultural expansion and intensification in SAFR, as well as strong environmental policies for balancing agricultural production and conservation goals, are needed to mitigate potentially large trade‐offs. The coupling of production frontiers should be a vehicle for the transfer not only of agricultural technology and production models, but also of experiences in environmental governance on emerging agricultural frontiers.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/878155bb7ecfb20ae6deb4b48c69ecac1019d213

Citations in the corpus

• Trade-offs between environment and livelihoods: Bridging the global land use and food security discussions (2017, unknown): “Under an optimal land use planning in terms of carbon efficiency, about 76.4 Mha of land in that region could be productive for soybean with a carbon trade-off between 2 and 6 tC per annual ton of soy under intensive farming (Gasparri et al. 2016).”