Prioritizing partners and products for the sustainability of the EU’s agri-food trade

© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Global agri-food systems couple sustainability challenges in producing countries to consumption behavior and regulations in destination markets. We assume that trade relations can be prioritized according to (1) the relevance (share of imports) and (2) leverage (share of domestic production for destination market). This study analyzes the relevance and leverage of the EU’s crop imports in monetary values, footprints, and deforestation. Our results identify high relevance and leverage values in trade relations with specific partner countries, particularly palm oil and rubber specialists in East Asia and soy-producing MERCOSUR countries. High leverage values in imports from African-Caribbean-Pacific small sugar specialists and other small countries highlight the EU’s potential to establish sustainability criteria. We suggest that the EU revises incoherent foreign and domestic policies and proactively engages with trading partners to include sustainability safeguards in the whole value chain with particular focus on trade relations with high relevance and leverage values.

The authors would like to thank Volker Grescho, Facundo Lucas, Hannah Korinth, and Sabina Khan for their technical support and feedback. G.P. received funding by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig of the German Research Foundation (DFG–FZT 118, 202548816). M.R.F.-L.’s contract is part of the RYC2021-032828-I grant, financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR.

Peer reviewed