Agricultural Trade and Environmental Sustainability

Kathy Baylis, Thomas Heckelei and Thomas Hertel
Additional contact information
Kathy Baylis: Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106-4060, USA

Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2021, vol. 13, issue 1, 379-401

Abstract: Global agriculture consumes substantial resources and produces significant pollution. By shifting its production to new locations, and inducing changes in technology and input use, trade has a substantial impact on environmental sustainability of the world's food systems, but due to suboptimal environmental policy, the exact nature of these impacts is in dispute. We review the literature on agricultural trade and environmental sustainability, highlighting the different approaches taken in ecology versus economics. While useful in identifying environmental costs, much of the ecological literature does not compare these costs to a trade-free counterfactual and can therefore be misleading. Further, by moving production to places with more resources and increasing production efficiency, trade can reduce the environmental impact of food production. On the other hand, trade can also limit the effectiveness of domestic environmental policy because production can be shifted to countries with less stringent regulations. However, recently, consumers are leveraging trade policy to induce exporters to improve environmental sustainability. While such policies are gaining traction in wealthy countries, evidence suggests that such measures will not reach their potential without buy-in from decision makers in the countries where the environmental damages are occurring.

Keywords: agricultural trade; externalities; pollution; sustainability; environmental policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q17 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-resource-101420-090453
Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anr:reseco:v:13:y:2021:p:379-401

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.annualreviews.org/action/ecommerce

DOI: 10.1146/annurev-resource-101420-090453

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Annual Review of Resource Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by http://www.annualreviews.org ().