sTradES Project

Manuscript: Mapping and quantifying nature’s contributions to people underpinning international food trade: the case of the Brazilian coffee and soy supply-chains

Global food systems dependent on nature’s contributions to people (NCP), yet the role of such contributions in international trade is largely underrecognised. Using publicly available data, we developed a spatially-explicit approach to map, quantify and trace a regulating NCP—wild pollination—and a non-material NCP—supporting identities—underpinning Brazilian coffee and soy supply-chains from producing municipalities to first importing countries. Our results underscore unequal NCP distributions across producing regions and trade flows. Of the production potentially resulting from wild pollination, 74%, in the case of coffee, and 66%, in the case of soy, were exported, with shares in countries’ imports ranging from 17-23% for coffee and 8-21% for soy. Our approach for mapping supporting identities at large scales shows feasibility for using publicly available data. The coffee and soy farm identities mapping indicates less diverse soy producing landscapes than coffee ones. For both products, municipalities with farm identities linked to lower agriculture-natural ecosystem integration have the largest trade shares in countries’ imports. Results suggest that smallholder farmers can be more dependent on regulating ecosystem functions. Our approach provides a framework to assess how NCP underpin food trade at finer resolution over large areas using data on the configuration of natural and cultural landscapes and locates where and which supply chain actors can collaborate to support more sustainable uses of natural and cultural resources.