The land footprint of the global food trade: Perspectives from a case study of soybeans
Introduction
The rapid development of globalization has led to an increasing amount of concern about the environmental pressures resulting from international trade (Gu et al., 2021, Pendrill et al., 2019b). Global supply and production chains have fundamentally transformed the way that commodities are produced, exchanged, and consumed and also affect the location and scale of both the resulting environmental and social impacts (Kastner et al., 2014, Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018). An increasing number of countries have managed to guarantee their food security through global trade, and the growth of the world’s economy and urban population indicate that the trends toward increased food consumption and changes in dietary preferences will continue (D'Odorico et al., 2014). The total area of virtual land used for global agricultural trade increased from 1.28 Mha in 1986 to 3.50 Mha in 2016; this was accompanied by a change in the worldwide distribution of cropland and also increased the burden on resources and the environment in many parts of the world (Gu et al., 2021, Qiang et al., 2020, Yu et al., 2019). These changes are also aggravating the pressure on domestic land resources; in addition, there are spillover effects on land resources in other countries as a result of imports (Yu et al., 2016). The patterns in economic and resource flow embodied in the global food trade may be subject to further change, particularly if the trade war between the United States and China continues (Taheripour et al., 2019). Consequently, it is of paramount economic and environmental significance to develop a model that can systematically evaluate the land footprint in different countries involved in the international food trade (Liu et al., 2013).
There has been growing awareness of the environmental impacts potentially caused by the food trade as these impacts affect land, water, and energy (Hoekstra, 2003, Hoekstra and Hung, 2005, Xu et al., 2020, Zhuo et al., 2016). The international trade in agricultural products plays an important role in compensating for land scarcity, especially in countries with few land resources (Ali et al., 2017). Globally, during the period 1998–2002, trade was estimated to save about 41 Mha land annually – equivalent to about 5% of all cultivated land (Fader et al., 2011). Because of the importance of international trade, national studies focusing on the environmental footprint of the food trade have been carried out, and there has also been some research into the role of virtual land in global trade (Bruckner et al., 2019, Chen et al., 2019a, Dalin and Rodríguez-Iturbe, 2016). China, for instance, has imported significant quantities of virtual land through agricultural trade in major crops, exhibiting trade-offs between the impacts of trade in crops on resources and the environment (Wu et al., 2018). As a result, virtual land imports grew from 1.2 Mha (equivalent to 0.93% of the cultivated land in China or 0.73% of its cropped area) in 2000 to 33 Mha (equivalent to 27.1% of cultivated land in China or 20.8% of its cropped area) in 2009 (Qiang et al., 2013). In the meantime, the Philippines’ virtual use of arable land for food has also increased from 15% to 30% of the nation’s domestic cropland area since the 1980s (Kastner and Nonhebel, 2010). Other research has examined the benefits and damage resulting from world trade, including a qualitative assessment of the environmental and socio-economic effects of virtual land use linked to agricultural imports (Würtenberger et al., 2006). The effects of international trade on the sustainability of the prairies have also been considered (Kissinger and Rees, 2009). Most of the biodiversity-related impacts of land and water use associated with food consumption were linked to imports and exports (Sandström et al., 2017). Researchers have also investigated the species loss ascribable to agricultural land use (Chaudhary and Kastner, 2016) as well as the deforestation resulting from the production of agricultural and forestry commodities (Escobar et al., 2020).
Agricultural land use has been one of the main driving forces behind the shift from an uncultivated, natural ecosystem to arable land. This has been accompanied by rising concern regarding the potential land degradation caused by commodity demand driven by international trade (Taherzadeh and Caro, 2019). In sustainable agriculture research, soybeans have long been regarded as one of the most important commodities linked to deforestation (Richards et al., 2012). Multiple studies on the soybean trade supply chain in Brazil, one of the world’s biggest soybean exporters, have suggested that the soybean trade is directly linked to deforestation (Faria and Almeida, 2016, Pendrill et al., 2019a). The existing literature provides plentiful evidence on the trade-oriented land footprint. For instance, developed countries consume a large number of goods and services produced both domestically and internationally, thus adding pressure on not only domestic land resources but also on those in other countries, crowding out other land uses (Yu et al., 2013). Wealthy countries have established high-pressure footprints in lower-income countries, thus shifting their environmental burden onto these countries (Verones et al., 2017). Overall, more and more developing regions are experiencing unequal and unfair ecological consequences because of land-use displacement originating in developed countries (Chen et al., 2019b).
Despite the research that has already been carried out, knowledge gaps still persist in relation to key issues. First, global-scale research has not identified the main types of agriculture-driven land use and food trade flows that are associated with the most serious impacts on the land. Most existing research into the soybean trade consists of national studies (Carrie et al., 2011) or regional analyses (Ren et al., 2021), and a more holistic perspective for calculating the consumption of global land resources is needed. Second, existing research does not sufficiently describe the ecological significance of land footprints (Chaudhary and Kastner, 2016). Changes in the land footprint driven by trade lead to changes in land-use dynamics; however, the existing analysis does not capture the cumulative land-use changes caused by the international food trade. Third, few studies have shed light on the size of the environmental footprint associated with the food trade and tend to focus only on physical quantities (MacDonald et al., 2015, Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018). It is, thus, important to estimate the exact amount of carbon loss associated with long-term land-cover change. These estimates could be important in gauging the potential adverse impacts on ecological services resulting from the soybean trade and have important implications for policies aimed at achieving sustainable agricultural systems under SDG 2.4.1 (UN, 2018).
Given the results of previous research and the knowledge gaps identified above, in this study, a multi-region input-output (MRIO) model was applied to trace changes in agricultural land use and the environmental and social losses caused by the food trade along global supply chains. Soybeans—one of the world's major crops—were used as an example, and the land footprints associated with the soybean trade in 2013 were quantified for 187 countries (Lenzen et al., 2013). The countries with the biggest land footprints – in relation to both the demand and supply sides – were identified, and the soybean flows associated with the greatest land impacts were assessed. Researching the land footprint from both the demand-side and supply-side perspectives provides a more comprehensive overview. Our contribution to research is that the cumulative region-to-region land footprints associated with the soybean trade at a global scale are revealed. An evaluation of the ecological losses that occur along the supply chain is also given. Our results will aid efforts to identify the underlying forces driving the consumption of land resources and provide policymakers with a clearer, more holistic understanding of the significance of regulating the food supply chain in order to mitigate the environmental footprint of the global food trade.
Section snippets
Design of the framework
The theoretical framework of this paper is mainly concerned with the simulation of the decline in carbon storage capacity caused by the soybean trade as a result of the transition to cropland from other land-cover types, especially forests.
First, the MRIO model was used to estimate the global relationship between the supply and consumption of cropland using inter-regional trade and land-use data. The soybean trade and soybean loss data were obtained from FAOSTAT (FAO, 2013), and the
Subsection region-to-region values and the link between land footprints and the soybean trade
The results of our calculations showed that the total land footprint associated with the global soybean trade – that is the sum of all the footprints associated with the bilateral trade in soybeans – amounted to 16.51 Mha. The ten countries associated with the largest footprints and the ten countries which suffered the greatest impact in terms of land footprints are listed in Table 2.
These results demonstrate that mainland China was the largest user of the world’s land resources as a result of
Discussion
This paper has highlighted how the MRIO model was used to highlight changes in the area of agricultural land used for the global soybean trade in 2013. Our assessment showed that the total land footprint embodied in the global soybean trade was 16.51 Mha. China had the largest land footprint associated with the soybean trade, accounting for 9.69 Mha of land. From the perspective of China, the trade in soybeans has been a contributor to a saving in domestic land use. Imports to China from the
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Xiaoxuan Liu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Le Yu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing. Wenjia Cai: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing. Qun Ding: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. Weixun Hu: Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing. Dailiang Peng: Conceptualization, Formal analysis. Wei Li:
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China, China (grant number: 2019YFE0115200; 2018YFB1502803; 2017YFA0604401; 2019YFA0606601) and the National Key Scientific and Technological Infrastructure project “Earth System Science Numerical Simulator Facility” (EarthLab), China.
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