The
increase in trade has big environmental repercussions as well as a big social
and cultural impact. The increasing distance makes it easier for market actors
to externalize costs and more difficult to citizens and the political system to
influence the way things are produced. Trade is not only a response to market
demand, it creates demand and therefore recreates the need for it; trade becomes
its own justification.
In
a previous
post I demonstrated the rapid growth of international trade in food and
agriculture commodities. Global food production increased with over 50% between
1986 and 2009. Meanwhile the trade in food for direct human consumption has increased
from 15% of total production in 1986 to 23% in 2009, thus about one fourth of
food production is traded.
This
globalization of food commodities has led to, or enabled, an increasing disconnection
between human populations and the land and water resources that support them
through crop and livestock production. The graph of global agricultural trade below
from Graham K. Macdonald et al 2015 (reproduced with permission), says more
than thousand words. [1]
 |
| Click to view |
Trade has improved food access, but primarily for those that are rich. In 1965 insufficient domestic production meant insufficient food supply, but in recent years the deficit has been increasingly compensated by rising food imports.[2] Of course, you have to afford food in order to buy it in international markets; the average per cap GDP in countries that achieve sufficient food supply by imports was approximately tenfold compared to countries with insufficient food supply and production.[3]
*
But isn’t it more efficient that countries with good
conditions produce food for those with less good conditions?
Perhaps, but this is really not driving trade. For
example, Sweden
has good conditions for arable farming and even better for livestock
production. Despite this it imports almost 50% of its beef and a lot of other
agriculture products it could grow. Meanwhile Sweden has let more than 1 million
hectare of arable land and even larger areas of pasture revert to forest or lie
idle. The reason that beef is imported is simply that it is cheaper to produce
somewhere else.
As I showed in my previous post trade can very well go
from places with scarcity of resources to places where these are abundant, as
other economic factors (or government support programs or tariffs) will
determine where production will be most competitive. The water use efficiency of food trade (i.e., food calories produced per unit volume of
water used) has declined in the last few decades.[4]
The
global food trade has also affected agricultural landscapes, fully in line with
trade theory. Competition drives farmers in to more and more specialization and
larger scale in order to cut costs. This first leads to that farms go into
monocropping and, ultimately, economies of scale will make whole landscapes
devoted to one or a few lines of production/commodities. The implication on
bio-diversity is huge and ironically some of these bread baskets are
increasingly becoming food deserts.
*
Trade puts pressure towards harmonization of standards
which has a number of non-desirable effects.
First, the development of international (harmonized)
standards is dominated by the richer countries and as they are the main
markets, exporters and exporting countries tend to go along with the standards
demanded by main markets. This puts producers in exporting countries in a
disadvantage as their needs are mostly not listened to. Other stakeholders in
exporting countries, such as consumers or farm workers have even less say in
the development of these standards.
Second, while some environmental problems are global
(global warming), most are local or regional in scope. For example, in some
countries, limiting erosion or water use in agriculture may be a primary objective,
in others eutrophication or pesticide contamination of waterways might be
central and in a third country with intensive agriculture the loss of bio-diversity in the
agriculture landscape. It is highly unlikely that international standards can
encapsulate all this. It is equally unlikely that the various social and
cultural situations will be well reflected in international standards.
Third,
there is a tendency for international standards to move towards lower
standards. For example, the EU farm lobby in Copa & Cogeca requests that
the license for glyphosate as a pesticide shall be renewed as a ban would “put
us at an unfair competitive disadvantage
vis a vis non-EU countries who export to the EU.” Similar arguments can be
heard in almost all countries.
*
Trade can allow population densities larger than those that
would prevail if these regions would have to rely solely on domestic supply.
But the increasing distance between consumers and producers comes with a lot of
problems. As Jeniffer Clapp[5]
outlines in Distant
agricultural landscapes, ”…distance
enables certain powerful actors to externalize ecological and social costs,
which in turn makes it difficult to link specific global actors to particular
biophysical and social impacts felt on local agricultural landscapes. Feedback
mechanisms that normally would provide pressure for improved agricultural
sustainability are weak because there is a lack of clarity regarding
responsibility for outcomes.” Consumers are mostly unaware of the ecological
and social consequences of their consumption choices and even if they wanted to
it makes it hard for them to influence.
There
is a similar effect on the political level. When the costs associated with a
products are externalized onto other actors and landscapes that may be half way
around the world, the politics of addressing those problems is fraught with
challenges and governments in the country where the products are consumed have
no jurisdiction in the places where it is produced. This is one of the drivers
behind the efforts to use “the market” and “consumer choice” to favour
sustainable production. But the ability of “consumer choice” to have a real
influence on the production in distant places is very limited (I elaborate my
arguments around this in the post Ethics for
sale? and even more in my book Global Eating Disorder).
Trade can and is more often a means to sustain affluent
lifestyles of wealthy nations, while reducing negative environmental impacts of
crop production on their own territories, allowing them to shift burdens
elsewhere.[6]
Meanwhile, trade often perverts the consumption of the resource-poor. In the article Taking
Political Ecology Global antropologist Richard Wilk shares his
observations from the Kekchi in Belize: ”I watched mothers selling
the eggs from their family’s chickens, to spend the money on Coca-Cola and
candy, while their children clearly needed protein more than sugar. I saw men
selling their pigs to get money for a boom box, or a carton of cigarettes, when
they could have been sending their kids to school, or building a latrine, or
improving their corn storage, or planting some cocoa.”[7]
*
Trade
is not only a response to market demand, it creates demand and therefore
recreates the need for it; trade becomes its own justification. The argument
goes along these lines:
“Development makes people happy. Trade is good for development. We need free trade in order to promote more trade. Thus, free trade makes more people happy”
This post will be followed by two more on the trade theme, please stay tuned.
[1] Graham K. Macdonald et al 2015, Rethinking Agricultural Trade
Relationships in an Era of Globalization http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org
[2]
Porkka M, Kummu M, Siebert S, Varis O (2013) From Food Insufficiency towards
Trade Dependency: A Historical Analysis of Global Food Availability. PLoS ONE
8(12): e82714. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0082714
[3]
Porkka M, Kummu M, Siebert S, Varis O (2013) From Food Insufficiency towards
Trade Dependency: A Historical Analysis of Global Food Availability. PLoS ONE
8(12): e82714. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0082714
[4] D’Odorico, P., J. A. Carr, F.
Laio, L. Ridolfi, and S. Vandoni (2014), Feeding humanity through global food
trade, Earth’s Future, 2, 458–469, doi:10.1002/2014EF000250.
[5] Clapp, J. Distant Agricultural Landscapes, Sustain Sci (2015)
10:305-316
[6] Thomas Kastner, Karl-Heinz Erb nd Helmut Haberl 2014 Rapid growth in
agricultural trade: effects on global area efficiency and the role of
management, Environ. Res. Lett. 9 (2014) 034015 (10pp)
[7] Wilk,
R. 1998, Taking Political Ecology Global, Indiana University.
