Fuelling the English breakfast: hidden energy flows in the Anglo-Danish trade 1870–1913

Abstract

The 1870-1914 globalization period had profound impacts on the international division of labour, with coalendowed countries specializing in the production of energyintensive manufacturing goods and others in the production of agricultural goods. This study analyses the environmental consequences of this specialization, by quantifying the flows of energy and hidden energy embodied in the bilateral trade between the UK, the industrial workshop of the world, and Denmark, a coal-poor country with an agricultural economy. We show that the transformations that occurred in Danish agriculture to meet the growing demand for breakfast foods in the UK required significant quantities of feed and coal. Denmark was a net importer of energy throughout the period and a net importer of hidden energy in 1870. However, by the end of this wave of globalization, Denmark had become a significant net exporter of hidden energy to the UK. This was due both to an increase in its land productivity and to the import of coal, grain and fertilizers from abroad.

Global agricultural trade and land system sustainability: Implications for ecosystem carbon storage, biodiversity, and human nutrition

“…28 It has been characterized as externalizing large amounts of land use in the 19th century by importing cereals while exporting mostly coal and manufactured goods. 29,30 By the beginning of the 20th century, other European countries gained importance as major importers of agricultural products, 13 as demonstrated for example in a recent quantification of net agricultural imports to Spain. 31 After World War I, Russia ceased being a major exporter of agricultural products 13 while exports from Latin America became increasingly important in the early 20th century.…”

Agroecosystem energy transitions: exploring the energy-land nexus in the course of industrialization

“…The national-scale energetic impacts of exporting livestock products based on domestic feed and fodder production are displayed for the case of Denmark (Henriques and Warde 2018), and the case of France demonstrates the increasing interconnectedness of food production and the processing industries (Kim et al 2018).…”

“…Regions accessible through ocean or riverine shipping, such as Denmark (Henriques and Warde 2018), Catalonia, Spain (Marco et al 2018), and Northern France (Kim et al 2018), or through early railway lines, like the U.S. Great Plains (Cunfer et al 2018), were able to produce agricultural products for international markets and, as in the USA, import fertilizers and fossil fuels already in the nineteenth century. According to the results in this special issue, supraregional market relations impacted the energy profiles of local subsistence agriculture already in the nineteenth century in many places of the world.…”