Global virtual-land flow and saving through international cereal trade

Abstract

With intense urbanization and sustained population growth, securing food production with limited land sources has increasingly become a pressing issue. Based on an analysis of international cereal (i.e., barley, buckwheat, maize, oats, rice, rye, sorghum, soybean, and wheat) trade and differences in yields of the cereal between export and import countries over the period of 2007 to 2011, we explore the great potential of land saving through the international cereal trade. By 'land saving', we refer to the reduced global total of lands required to produce a necessary amount of cereal when cereal is exported from a country with relatively large yield of the cereal to a country with relatively small yield of the cereal. Our scenario analysis suggests that international cereal trade would help mitigate the shortage of domestic arable land for many island countries (e.g., Japan) and countries in the arid Middle East and North Africa (e.g., Syria and Morocco). Furthermore, international cereal trade has the potential to generate 'land saving' of 50,092,284 ha of land per year, which is roughly the size of Spain. Drawing upon the definition of a similar concept-virtual water (Hoekstra and Hung 2002), we define virtual land as the area of land resources used for the production of goods. Through introducing the concept of virtual land, we believe land resources that are traditionally considered as stationary resources can flow with anthropogenic socioeconomic activities. The largest virtual-land flows (> 3,000,000 ha/year) exist between the United States (US) to China, Brazil to China, the US to Japan, the US to Mexico, and Argentina to China. However, not all virtual-land flows necessarily result in land saving. Thus, more endeavors are needed to plan the virtual-land flows for a larger land saving at the global scale.

Spillover effect offsets the conservation effort in the Amazon

“…Another main advantage of the telecoupling framework is that it provides a stage to study the flows between systems over a great distance (Deines et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2015b) where other studies are missing (Zhang et al, 2016). The flow between sending and spillover systems is hard to quantify, so here we demonstrate the flows of soybean traded from the sending and spillover systems to the receiving system ( Figure 10).…”

The environmental and socioeconomic trade-offs of importing crops to meet domestic food demand in China

“…We estimate the 'alternative' harvested area (or N inputs and N surplus) by assuming the additional production will be at the current yield and NUE levels at the importing country (figure 1). Admittedly, producing the imported crops domestically is likely to further intensify N use or expand cropland on marginal land, and consequently leads to lower NUE and N yield level (Qiang et al 2013, Zhang et al 2016, Ali et al 2017. Therefore, the 'alternative' N and harvested area estimated against the current domestic level is rather conservative, at least in the short term.…”

Drivers of Land Embodied in International Trade of Rice: The Italian Case Study

“…The VLT reflects the land embodied in trade of commodities, highlighting how the growing land demand put increasing pressure on local and national land resources because of international demand. Although, some studies have investigated the VLT of different commodities, including rice, at the global level (Zhang et al 2016), this study aims to focus on a specific, relevant and current case study concerning Italy and the two largest exporters of rice in Italy such as Cambodia and Myanmar. In particular the objective of this paper is to develop a VLT to estimate the amount of land exported from Cambodia and Myanmar to Italy due to the export of rice during the period 2013-2016.…”