Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 181, March 2021, 106915
Ecological Economics

Analysis
Does agricultural trade reduce pressure on land ecosystems? Decomposing drivers of the embodied human appropriation of net primary production

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106915Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • International trade reduced HANPP before 1999, but worsened it afterwards.

  • Increased sourcing from the tropics raised HANPP since late 1990s.

  • Global allocation of agricultural land was less efficient after 2008 than in 1986.

  • Changes in the origin of agricultural products had small effects on global HANPP.

  • Changes in the origin of imports were main driver of Western Europe's eHANPP.

Abstract

Agriculture contributes to deforestation and the conversion of other terrestrial ecosystems, affecting important ecosystem functions. A growing share of the produced agricultural commodities is traded between countries. It is widely assumed that international trade reduces humanity's pressure on land ecosystems by optimizing the mix of origin, i.e. by sourcing products from countries where land is used more efficiently. We examined if recent changes in the origin of agricultural products reduced humanity's impact on a fundamental ecosystem function, the net primary production (NPP) of vegetation. We performed an index decomposition analysis on a dataset of human appropriation of net primary production embodied in bilateral trade flows of 392 agricultural products between 167 countries (eHANPP) from 1986 to 2011. We found that while changes in the origin of agricultural products globally reduced HANPP in the 1990s, this trend reversed since 1999. This turn is explained by the increased sourcing of agricultural products from tropical regions, for exports and domestic consumption. After 2008, countries – on average – increasingly sourced their agricultural products from less efficient regions than in 1986. Our results suggest that the potential of trade to reduce humanity's impact on land ecosystems has not been exploited in the recent past.

Keywords

Land use
Land ecosystems
International trade
Embodied HANPP
Index decomposition analysis
Telecoupling

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