Trade Feeds the World, But Who Pays the Environmental Price?

A new study challenges one of the more comfortable assumptions surrounding global food trade: that countries can make their food systems more sustainable simply by importing from elsewhere when domestic production becomes environmentally costly.

The study, "Redistributed, Not Reduced: The Role of International Trade in Global Food Supply Sustainability," published in the journal Sustainability, is authored by Clement Boucher, Gregory N. Sixt and Kenneth M. Strzepek, researchers affiliated with institutions including ETH Zurich, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford, BOKU University and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

Based on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, AQUASTAT and IFPRI, the researchers introduce the Food Supply Sustainability Index (FSSI), which brings carbon footprint, soil degradation, water stress, international trade and future climate-driven trade patterns into a single framework.

International trade can help countries escape severe domestic environmental constraints, but those pressures do not disappear. They frequently move across borders. Richer economies can improve the apparent sustainability of their food supply through imports, while poorer regions, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, may inherit greater environmental exposure. Climate change could make that imbalance substantially harder to manage.

Food Abundance Has an Environmental Geography We Rarely Measure

The FSSI covers 151 countries or country groups, with 2021 serving as the main base year for environmental indicators. Trade analysis focuses on nine major agricultural commodities, while the index evaluates three environmental dimensions: greenhouse-gas pressure, agricultural pressures associated with soil degradation, and water stress.

Scores run from zero to 100, with higher scores representing greater environmental pressure. The three pillars receive equal weight and are combined using a geometric mean intended to prevent strength in one area from completely compensating for weakness in another.

Across all countries, 53 percent are classified in the medium-or-higher pressure categories. But that figure rises sharply with income: only 23.1 percent of low-income countries fall into those categories, compared with 50 percent of lower-middle-income, 53.3 percent of upper-middle-income and 71.4 percent of high-income countries. The finding complicates the idea that economic development automatically produces environmentally superior food systems. High-income economies often depend on intensive agricultural systems that achieve high productivity through substantial use of energy, fertilizers, pesticides and other resources.

Poorer countries can appear more sustainable for a very different reason. The authors describe this phenomenon as "sustainability by necessity": relatively low environmental pressure may reflect structural constraints and limited agricultural inputs rather than a deliberate transition toward sustainable production.

The distinction is critical for the Global South. A country with low fertilizer use, low production and limited access to technology cannot simply freeze its agricultural system in place as food demand rises. The development challenge is to increase productivity without replicating the environmentally intensive trajectory followed by many wealthier economies.

Trade Can Clean Up National Scores While Exporting the Damage

The study becomes especially revealing when international trade enters the calculation. Once imports are incorporated, countries at the environmental extremes tend to move toward the middle. Saudi Arabia, for example, moves from an extreme-pressure classification under domestic production to medium pressure when imports are included. Across the system, trade creates a kind of convergence in national sustainability scores.

However, convergence should not be confused with environmental improvement. The environmental pressure embodied in food has simply been redistributed. Higher-income and highly trade-integrated countries frequently record lower pressure when imports are considered. In effect, part of the environmental cost associated with supplying their food is generated abroad. Lower-income economies more commonly move in the opposite direction, with Sub-Saharan African countries frequently experiencing increased pressure.

This creates a major accounting and governance problem. A country can reduce water use, agricultural emissions or intensive chemical inputs within its own territory while increasing reliance on food produced under environmental stress elsewhere. Domestic sustainability indicators may consequently improve even though the global food system has become no more sustainable.

For governments, companies and investors, the implication is that supply-chain sustainability must extend beyond national borders. The relevant question is no longer simply whether imports secure adequate quantities of affordable food, but what environmental risks are embedded in those imports and where those costs ultimately fall.

This changes the logic of responsible sourcing, trade agreements and food-security strategies. A diversified supply chain may be geopolitically resilient yet environmentally fragile if several suppliers depend on heavily stressed water systems or degrading agricultural resources.

Climate Change Risks Turning Today's Inequality Into Tomorrow's Food Vulnerability

The researchers then use IFPRI's IMPACT modelling framework to examine how changing trade patterns could affect sustainability through 2050 under multiple climate and socioeconomic scenarios.

The distributional divide becomes more pronounced. High-income countries maintain comparatively stable sustainability scores, while low-income countries experience rising environmental pressure. South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa record some of the highest regional scores, but Sub-Saharan Africa stands out because pressure increases over time while uncertainty is also substantially greater.

Under the study's high-impact SSP3 comparison, countries experiencing the largest increases in environmental pressure are predominantly low- and lower-middle-income economies, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for many of the largest deteriorations.

The development implications extend well beyond environmental policy. Many of the countries facing greater future pressure will also need to expand food supplies, increase agricultural productivity, accommodate population growth and strengthen resilience to climate shocks. That produces a difficult three-way challenge: produce more food, protect increasingly stressed natural resources and avoid dangerous dependence on vulnerable trade channels.

It also raises questions about the traditional development sequence in which countries intensify production first and deal with environmental consequences later. Climate change may make that pathway far more expensive, and potentially impossible to reverse in some ecosystems.

Managing Risk Across Borders

The FSSI's greatest value may therefore be less as another global ranking than as a warning against governing interconnected problems in separate policy silos. Agricultural productivity, climate adaptation, food imports, water security and environmental sustainability increasingly form one system.

For governments, that means supplier diversification should consider environmental exposure alongside price, reliability and geopolitical risk. Countries may need sourcing portfolios that reduce dependence on environmentally vulnerable production centres without making food prohibitively expensive.

For development institutions, the findings strengthen the case for sustainable intensification in lower-income economies: raising yields through knowledge, technology, infrastructure, resource efficiency and better agricultural practices rather than relying principally on increasing chemical and natural-resource inputs. The authors also highlight approaches including nutrient recycling, waste reduction, renewable energy and regenerative agriculture. That agenda also creates opportunities for investment in efficient irrigation, climate-resilient infrastructure, renewable-energy applications in agriculture, circular food systems and better supply-chain intelligence.

The study nevertheless has important limitations. Its definition of sustainability covers three environmental pillars rather than the full social, economic and ecological dimensions of food systems. Its soil indicator measures fertilizer and pesticide pressure rather than soil condition directly. National averages can hide major subnational differences, particularly in water stress. Future scenarios cover nine major traded commodities and assume constant domestic sustainability to isolate changes caused by trade. The model also does not capture transport emissions, substitution effects, changing consumer behaviour or feedback between trade and production.

These limitations matter when interpreting individual country rankings, but they do not diminish the study's larger strategic insight. Food security and environmental sustainability can no longer be treated as purely national achievements. As climate change reorganizes agricultural production and trade, environmental pressure will increasingly travel through the same networks that move wheat, rice, meat, dairy and other essential commodities around the world.