Trade and Climate Mitigation Interactions Create Agro‐Economic Opportunities With Social and Environmental Trade‐Offs in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is a major agricultural exporting region, and is likely to maintain this pivotal role in the coming decades (CELAC et al., 2016;Morris et al., 2020). The region supplies the world with large fractions of several notable commodities; for example, LAC exported 91 million tonnes (Mt) of soybeans (59% of world exports), 22 Mt of raw sugar (62%), 4.2 Mt of coffee (52%) and 2.9 Mt of beef products (38%) in 2019 (FAOSTAT, 2022). Major agricultural exporters include Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile (Morris et al., 2020;Willaarts et al., 2014). It is critical to understand the nature of future agricultural production and trade opportunities that will emerge across the region, because those opportunities will directly affect societal objectives such as economic growth and sustainable development. Agriculture currently accounts for more than 5% of GDP in 20 LAC countries, and contributes to economic growth and diversification, employment, poverty reduction, food security, and ecosystem services (Morris et al., 2020). How agricultural production and trade dynamics unfold in LAC also has implications far beyond the region. International agricultural trade originating from LAC represents a large and growing source of global supply-chain risk, with the potential to create complex and far-reaching food, energy, and water security risks (Taherzadeh et al., 2021).Despite its importance, the scale of future agricultural production and trade opportunities in LAC is not well understood. Numerous forces, both within and outside LAC, could shape these opportunities, as well as their economic and environmental consequences across the region. For example, technological change in agriculture and socio-economic growth may greatly increase the supply of and demand for agricultural commodities

gcamfaostat: An R package to prepare, process, and synthesize FAOSTAT data for global agroeconomic and multisector dynamic modeling

“…Global economic and multisector dynamic models have become pivotal tools for investigating complex interactions between human activities and the environment, as evident in recent research (Doelman et al, 2022;Fujimori et al, 2022;Ven et al, 2023). Agriculture and land use (AgLU) plays a critical role in these models, particularly when used to address key agroeconomic questions (Graham et al, 2023;Yarlagadda et al, 2023;Zhang et al, 2023;Zhao et al, 2024). Sound economic modeling hinges significantly upon the accessibility and quality of data (Bruckner et al, 2019;Calvin et al, 2022;Chepeliev, 2022).…”