Abstract
Increasing trade between countries and gains in income have given consumers around the world access to a richer and more diverse set of commercial plant products (i.e., foods and fibers produced by farmers). According to the economic theory of comparative advantage, countries open to trade will be able to consume more–in terms of volume and diversity–if they concentrate production on commodities that they can most cost-effectively produce, while importing goods that are expensive to produce, relative to other countries. Here, we perform a global analysis of traded commercial plant products and find little evidence that increasing globalization has incentivized agricultural specialization. Instead, a country’s plant production and consumption patterns are still largely determined by local evolutionary legacies of plant diversification. Because tropical countries harbor a greater diversity of lineages across the tree of life than temperate countries, tropical countries produce and consume a greater diversity of plant products than do temperate countries. In contrast, the richer and more economically advanced temperate countries have the capacity to produce and consume more plant species than the generally poorer tropical countries, yet this collection of plant species is drawn from fewer branches on the tree of life. Why have countries not increasingly specialized in plant production despite the theoretical financial incentive to do so? Potential explanations include the persistence of domestic agricultural subsidies that distort production decisions, cultural preferences for diverse local food production, and that diverse food production protects rural households in developing countries from food price shocks. Less specialized production patterns will make crop systems more resilient to zonal climatic and social perturbations, but this may come at the expense of global crop production efficiency, an important step in making the transition to a hotter and more crowded world.
Highlights
One of the most striking biological patterns on Earth is the latitudinal gradient in biodiversity, where the tropics produce more species and evolutionary lineages than the temperate zone [1]
We present six model estimates over all plant data, with diversity and richness metrics in the first column and independent variables in the remaining columns. g indicates contemporaneous annual change in logged country-level gross domestic product per capita, o indicates contemporaneous annual change in logged country-level trade openness, nra indicates contemporaneous annual change in country-level nominal rate of assistance, tbi indicates contemporaneous annual change in trade bias index, and |L| is the absolute value of country capital latitudes (N = 56 and 18 time periods used in the estimation)
Gaps in the latitudinal production and consumption of plant diversity and richness have remained relatively static over time despite economic globalization
Summary
One of the most striking biological patterns on Earth is the latitudinal gradient in biodiversity, where the tropics produce more species and evolutionary lineages than the temperate zone [1]. In particular, show an increasing biodiversity trend towards the equator [2]. Until recently, this pattern largely limited the plant diversity any one society could regularly produce and consume. Since the mid-1600s, when ships started to regularly transport food, seeds, and botanical knowledge between continents, were societies able to loosen the very tight relationship between their environment and the plants they produced (e.g., the transfer of potato production from Peru to Ireland) and consumed (e.g., the import of pineapples to Europe from Suriname) [3]. The green revolution in agricultural production [5], lower tariffs on imports [6], and more cost-effective trading technology [5,6,7,8] have made it much easier for modern societies to consume a diversity of plants far beyond their pre-modern plant diversity
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
