The ecological impact of land use changes by human dominated activities is massive. A significant portion of expanding anthropogenic land use is attributed to expanding croplands and pastures for food production. Earlier works have described increasing land-use as a socio- economic problem with complex human-nature coupling and identified drivers as well as inhibitors of farmland expansion at the cost of natural ecosystems. Our goal is to identify and study one socio-political driver of land-use expansion; the Agricultural Trade Network (ATN). This network plays a critical role in land-use problems as more than a quarter of agricultural land resources are accessed through trade. With the current trend of tit for tat tariff escalations and protectionist trade policies among leading economies, major changes in the structure and properties of the ATN are expected in a very short time period making it a potent driver for large scale land-use changes. This leads us to our motivating question: what are the land-use impacts and hence, the carbon footprint, of a trade war?
We build a dynamic network model describing how tariff changes trigger shifts in ATN structures and use the yield data from FAOSTAT to make predictions about corresponding global land use changes. We consider several trade war scenarios, with varying degrees of participation by countries and unique patterns of tariff escalation and tariff distribution.
Results/Conclusions:
Under the assumption of current global consumption rate we project substantial increase in land-use changes in all the following scenarios: (i) restrictive Trade War (TW) with no contagion (ii) escalating TW with no contagion and (iii) escalating TW with contagion. While factoring in the current trends of increase in consumption and yield rates, we observe regional trends of agricultural expansion in parallel with net increase in cultivated lands and pastures globally. Tariffs placed on agricultural products with no substitute products (e.g China placing tariffs on US soybeans) but replaceable supplier nations (in this case Brazil and Argentina) result in heavier expansion in comparison to tariffs on products with either of the replaceable options. Additionally, certain regions of the globe may become “stress points”, bearing the increase in land-use corresponding to multiple land intensive product. Our results suggest that in most cases parties not involved directly in a trade war are ones most affected regionally as a consequence of it - making the concerned regions analogous to a battlefield in an armed conflict.