Trading More Food in the Context of High-end Climate Change: Implications for Land Displacement through Agricultural Trade

The study analyzes the impacts of agricultural trade liberalization on cropland use dynamics, focusing not only on the total amount of cropland area, but also on the spatial allocation among regions. With an agro-economic dynamic optimization model, the study is able to analyze the leakage effects resulted from trade liberalization as well as climate impacts on crop yields, by using crop yields simulation output from a vegetation model based on different climate models. In the scenario of high-end climate impacts on crop yields, although trade liberalization mitigates the negative impacts of climate impacts on agricultural supply and spares the land resource on the global scale, it further deteriorates the virtual trade of cropland among regions. The absolute amount of total cropland imbalance will increase by 272.2 million hectares at the end of the twenty-fist century. Latin America and China are the main exporters of cropland relate to food production, while Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are the regions of exporting cropland. By considering climate projection uncertainty, the study finds that the general trend of cropland displacement remains, although there exists a wide range for the amount of traded cropland in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Acknowledgement :