De rol van landbouwhandel en -handelsbeleid in klimaatmitigatie en -adaptatie
Year: 2022
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Food systems face a dual challenge: they are responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and are at the same time heavily affected by climate change. Agri-food trade across borders plays an important role in this challenge as food systems are globalized, and both the GHG emission intensity of and climate change impacts on agricultural production vary internationally. The overall research objective of the PhD thesis is to investigate the role of agricultural trade and trade policy in contributing to climate change mitigation - preventing and reducing anthropogenic GHG emissions and increasing carbon sinks - and adaptation - coping with the adverse effects of climate change - in the Agriculture, Forestry, and Land Use (AFOLU) sector. In Chapter 1 I describe the conditions explaining the linkages between agri-food trade and climate change mitigation and adaptation, and I review the current evidence and research gap on these linkages. The subsequent chapters address specific elements of the research gap, focusing mostly on climate change adaptation and on challenges for the AFOLU sector in Africa. In Chapter 2 I investigate how climate change and trade policies interact in their impact on global hunger projections up to 2050 using the Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM), a spatially explicit partial equilibrium economic model of the global land use sectors. Under the current level of trade integration, climate change would lead to up to 55 million people who are undernourished in 2050. Without adaptation through trade, the impacts of global climate change would increase to 73 million people who are undernourished (+33%). Reduction in tariffs as well as institutional and infrastructural barriers would decrease the negative impact to 20 million (–64%) people. We analyze the adaptation effect of trade and climate-induced specialization patterns. The adaptation effect is strongest for hunger-affected import-dependent regions. However, in hunger-affected export-oriented regions, partial trade integration can lead to increased exports at the expense of domestic food availability. The chapter concludes that although trade integration is a key component of adaptation, it needs sensitive implementation to benefit all regions. In Chapter 3 I assess the impact of continental free trade and domestic agricultural market development in Africa on agricultural trade, undernourishment, and GHG emissions from the AFOLU sector by 2050. By modelling trade costs from farm gate to potential import markets across eight African regions in the GLOBIOM model, we investigate the impact of individual components of continental free trade and the complementary role of domestic agricultural development through increased market access for farmers and agricultural intensification. We find that free trade would increase intra-African agricultural trade six fold by 2030 but outside food imports and undernourishment would reduce only marginally. Agricultural development could almost eliminate undernourishment in Africa by 2050 at only a small cost of increased global GHG emissions. Aligning continental free trade with local agricultural development policies is found to be crucial to increase intra-African trade gains, promote food security, and achieve climate change mitigation objectives. In Chapter 4 I investigate the implications of subnational trade costs for the role of international crop trade in climate change adaptation in Eastern and Southern Africa. The chapter is motivated by the observation that projections of future climate change impacts on crop yields vary spatially and market integration and trade patterns determine to what extent climatic changes in one location create impacts in other areas. We develop a partial equilibrium model of intra- and international crop trade in Eastern and Southern Africa and use it to simulate a set of climate change and trade counterfactuals. The counterfactual simulations are analyzed under two different model setups, with national markets or with subnational markets, and the comparison suggest that the role of international trade may be biased when subnational trade costs are ignored. We discuss further extensions needed to improve the model calibration and counterfactual analyses, including by capturing data on informal cross-border trade and uncertainty in climate change yield projections. In Chapter 5 I examine the impact of agricultural storage and trade on food insecurity under climate-induced variability and uncertainty in agricultural production. We develop a novel theoretical framework combining household level saving and consumption smoothing with market level trade and storage. Based on a numerical simulation exercise, we derive three qualitative predictions on intertemporal consumption smoothing under climatic variability. To empirically validate the predictions, we use data on climate extremes, food insecurity, and market access at sub-national and intra-annual resolution for 12 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa from 2009 to 2016. We find that in areas where households face larger market transaction costs, represented by longer travel times to the closest large city, extreme dry climatic conditions have a significantly larger impact on food insecurity. Dry extremes also increase food insecurity to a larger extent in areas with higher travel times to the closest large port. The chapter concludes that micro- and macro-level economic interactions and spatiotemporal climatic correlations are crucial to consider when investigating market-based adaptation to climate change. In Chapter 6 I link the insights from the previous four chapters with respect to three overarching research themes: the pattern of comparative advantage in agriculture, the role of agricultural trade in climate change adaptation, and the role of agricultural trade in climate change mitigation. I discuss the relevance and policy messages of these findings. I then summarize the limitations of the thesis and conclude by discussing promising areas of further research. Overall, to improve our understanding of the linkages between trade and climate change in the AFOLU sector, future research needs to expand on the spatial cross-scales analyses in this thesis, advance along different temporal scales (short-term, long-term, and cross-scale feedbacks), and investigate trade-offs and synergies between agri-food trade as a mitigation and adaptation mechanism.
Source: Lirias
Author: Janssens, Charlotte
Language: English
Subfield: Agronomy and Crop Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDGs: Climate action, Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7037144333