Abstract
Technology, transportation and global appetites have transformed trade relationships between near and distant countries. The impact of distant food demand on local agricultural production and trade has attracted considerable scientific scrutiny, yet little is known about how distant trade affects trade relationships and production between adjacent countries. In this paper, we explore this important issue by examining international food trade and agriculture production, which represent how distant places are connected through trade networks. By analyzing patterns of soybean, corn and wheat trading between 1991–2016 under the framework of metacoupling (human-nature interactions within, as well as between adjacent and distant systems), this study provides new insights into the spatio-temporal dynamics of trade flows. Results reveal that telecoupled (between distant countries) trade interacts with the geo-political landscape to enhance or offset intracoupled (within country) production and pericoupled (between neighboring countries) trade. Evidence from the literature and the results of autoregressive integrated moving average models indicate that when restrictions are placed on distant export routes, pericoupled trade increased. The extent to which the telecoupled food trade affected the pericoupled trade and intracoupled processes holds implications for the true extent of production driven by distant demands.
Highlights
International food trade and globalized agricultural production connect humans and the environment around the world [1,2,3,4,5]
While Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay share a border with Brazil, as well as suitable land for soybean cultivation, their varying shares of the Chinese soybean market are largely reflective of the unique geo-political strategies taken by each country’s respective government
Along with support from the literature, these results suggest that Argentina’s domestic tariff on soybean exports slowed soybean expansion and drove corn expansion while wheat intracoupling has remained relatively stable during the study period [21,50,51,52,53,54]
Summary
International food trade and globalized agricultural production connect humans and the environment around the world [1,2,3,4,5]. The rate and scale of the food trade have significantly increased in the past several decades, even though both importing and exporting countries produce and consume similar types of food [6] These interconnections may continue to increase as population growth increases caloric demand and greater affluence drives changes in consumption patterns [7,8,9,10]. China’s soybean demand is primarily driven by the meat consumption of their burgeoning middle class [19]; the catalyst that initiated the flow of soybeans from west to east was China lowering the soybean import tariff from 130% to 3% in 1995 [12,17] This reduction quickly increased China’s soybean imports and sent a signal through the global market that increased demand for, and production of, soybeans around the world. Given the economic [19,21], environmental [14,22] and political [23,24] importance of the soybean trade, the dynamics among Brazil, China and the U.S have been widely studied by academics [14,15,25], governments [26,27,28], industry [29] and NGOs [30]
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