Abstract
Cropland is crucial for supplying humans with biomass products, above all, food. Globalization has led to soaring volumes of international trade, resulting in strongly increasing distances between the locations where land use takes place and where the products are consumed. Based on a dataset that allows tracing the flows of almost 450 crop and livestock products and consistently allocating them to cropland areas in over 200 nations, we analyze this rapidly growing spatial disconnect between production and consumption for the period from 1986 to 2009. At the global level, land for export production grew rapidly (by about 100 Mha), while land supplying crops for direct domestic use remained virtually unchanged. We show that international trade on average flows from high-yield to low-yield regions: compared to a hypothetical no-trade counterfactual that assumes equal consumption and yield levels, trade lowered global cropland demand by almost 90 Mha in 2008 (3-year mean). An analysis using yield gap data (which quantify the distance of prevailing yields to those attainable through the best currently available production techniques) revealed that differences in land management and in natural endowments contribute almost equally to the yield differences between exporting and importing nations. A comparison of the effect of yield differences between exporting and importing regions with the potential of closing yield gaps suggests that increasing yields holds greater potentials for reducing future cropland demand than increasing and adjusting trade volumes based on differences in current land productivity.
Highlights
While croplands covered only some 12% of the global land area in 2000, they supplied humanity with over 90% of food calories [1]
In the year 2008, cropland used for exports amounted to over 20% of total global cropland area, which is more than twice the area of North America’s entire croplands
We present cropland demand for four cases: (i) in the year 2000, the 15 crops included in the calculation covered 829 Mha. (ii) The result of the no-trade counterfactual for these 15 crops is 8% or 67 Mha higher and indicates that the prevailing trade structure increased the area efficiency of land use. (iii) Assuming the trade pattern prevailing in 2000 and that all countries would reach attainable yield levels reduces global cropland demand to 539 Mha, implying a reduction of 35% compared to case (i). (iv) a case with both counterfactuals combined results in a reduction of cropland area to 563 Mha (−32% compared to the year 2000 value)
Summary
While croplands covered only some 12% of the global land area in 2000, they supplied humanity with over 90% of food calories [1]. Cropland area harvested for food production increased by 32% from 1963 to 2005, despite considerable increases in output per unit area [5, 6]. Recent trends in cropland area change differ markedly between world regions: while cropland area has been stable or slightly declining in
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