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ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

Trade policies have environmental implications

Nature Food volume 2, pages 559–560 (2021)Cite this article

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US–China trade relations have implications for global nitrogen and phosphorus surpluses, and increasing blue water demand. The case shows that trade policy analysis needs to integrate environmental considerations.

In this issue of Nature Food, Yao et al.8 estimate the potential impacts of the US–China trade war on nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) surpluses and demand for blue water. At the national level, China’s retaliatory tariffs will cause US farmers to reduce the production of targeted crops, especially soybean. To fill the gap, soybean production in China and South America will expand. Since soybean is an N-fixing crop, shifting soybean production from the United States to South America would increase N surplus in the former by 105 million kg and decrease N surplus in the latter by 200.5 million kg, leading to a net reduction in global N surplus. Regarding P surplus, since soybean in South America5 and crops that replace soybean, such as wheat in the United States, demand more P, P surplus in these two regions would increase, driving up global P surplus. In terms of blue water consumption, the increase of non-soybean oilseeds that replaces US soybean drives up global water demand. These results are robust to a range of parameter values in the trade model and the environmental stressor intensities. Disaggregating the national impacts, Yao et al. find heterogeneous regional impacts that sometimes deviate from the national impacts, creating hot spots with elevated levels of environmental stresses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Applied Statistics, and International Business, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA

    Minghao Li

  2. Department of Economics and Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD), Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Wendong Zhang

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  1. Minghao Li
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  2. Wendong Zhang
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Correspondence to Wendong Zhang.

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Li, M., Zhang, W. Trade policies have environmental implications. Nat Food 2, 559–560 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00342-5

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