Increased Agricultural Trade and its Impacts on Food System, Land-use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The volume of agricultural trade increased by more than ten times throughout the past six decades and is likely to continue with similar rates in the future. Thereby the issue of environmental and climatic impacts of this development is a recently discussed concern in literature. We analyse future trade scenarios covering the next five decades by evaluating economic and environmental effects using the global land-use model MAgPIE ("Model of Agricultural Production and its Impact on the Environment"). The model predicts global landuse patterns in a spatially explicit way and uses endogenously derived technological change and land expansion rates. Our study is the first which combines trade analysis with a spatially explicit mapping of landuse patterns and greenhouse gas emissions. By implementing self-sufficiency rates in the regional demand and supply equations, we are able to simulate different trade settings. We focus on three scenarios: the default scenario fixes current trade patterns until the year 2045, the liberalisation scenario assumes a path of increasing trade liberalization which ends with no trade barriers in 2045 and the policy scenario follows a historically derived pathway by reducing trade barriers by 10% in each decade. Results show lower global costs of food production and lower rates of food price rises due to liberalisation. Regions with comparative advantages like Latin America for oilcrops and China for cereals will export more. In contrast, regions like the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia face the highest increases of imports. Deforestation, mainly in Latin America, leads to significant amounts of additional carbon emissions coming from further trade liberalisation. Non-CO2 Emissions will increase most in China due to rising livestock demand in the region. In general, the model predicts a non-continous behaviour in terms of environmental damages when trade increases continously.