Growing population and rising incomes are leading to an ever-increasing demand for animal-based foods. Pigmeat is currently the most consumed meat globally, even exceeding the consumption of poultry meat. Despite the disproportionate environmental burden of animal production – mostly attributable to associated feed demand, up-to-date country-scale quantifications of the land and water impacts of the concentrate feed (mainly cereals and soybean) and co-products required to support pig production are still missing. In addition, the specific role that international feed trade plays in separating resource use from consumption and in altering resource use efficiencies remains unclear. This paper analyses at a country-scale the internal and external consumption of natural resources (i.e., land and water) to support pig feed production in 2018. Combining data on the country- and production system-specific diets and crop-specific yields with an agro-hydrological model, we find that 64.1 Mha of agricultural land (5% of all croplands) and 332.6 km3 of water (both green and blue) (6% of all agricultural water use) were utilized by China, EU-27 and the United States (accounting for 70% of pigmeat production) to produce pig feed alone. Comparing domestic feed production scenarios with those that also consider the feed trade, we show that global resource consumption tends to be more efficient when considering international feed trade, especially in China and EU-27, while sometimes causing significant environmental impacts. This demonstrates the need to investigate the environmental effects of pig feed associated both with the domestic use of natural resources, but also to the ones displaced by international trade.
Climate change can potentially drive variations in the frequency and magnitude of hydrological extremes, and in turn the impact these events have on agriculture. Agricultural damages resulting from extreme events can significantly affect food security at multiple scales, especially in contexts where pre-existing unfavourable social and economic conditions already hinder the stability and the effectivity of the food supply chain. In these contexts, formulating approaches to directly quantify food security impacts of extreme events in a way that is compatible with local data availability, but at the same time reliable and transparent, becomes a crucial and urgent matter. Moreover, while the importance of the multifaceted repercussions of agricultural damage on food security have been highlighted in the current literature, investigation on impacts different than reduced crop availability remain understudied. Here, we propose a methodology to derive metrics of food availability and food access impacts from post-disaster assessments, by putting the affected communities at the core of the analysis. We then provide perspectives on food utilization and food stability impacts. We apply the methodology on the severe floods that affected Malawi in the early months of 2015. We find that agricultural losses correspond to food sufficient for feeding more than 300,000 people and for balancing the diet of almost 2.3 million. Food security impacts also appear to disproportionately hit poorer and less food-secure districts. The proposed methodology is easily replicable in other case studies, also moving beyond floods as the triggering extreme event.
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