Search

The paper investigates the influence of major food corporations on global rice and coffee markets from 2013 to 2022, with a focus on market presence and water usage. It uses detailed data from the Euromonitor Passport and the CWASI datasets to analyze environmental impacts and virtual water (VW) flows at the company level, addressing gaps in the existing literature. Key findings show that although rice sales are larger than those of coffee in quantity, coffee embeds a higher total water use due to its greater unit water footprint (WF). The rice market is less internationalized and concentrated compared to the coffee market, where a few companies hold significant market shares across multiple countries. In 2022, the top 12 rice-selling companies control 16% of the global rice WF, exceeding the combined WF of the top three rice-importing nations. Similarly, the top 15 coffee-selling companies command 55% of the global roasted coffee WF, with significant disparities in VW quantities compared to major importing nations. The coffee market exhibits a higher number of companies with larger shares of WF than volumes, with this disparity increasing over time. Furthermore, more countries exhibit high and moderate concentration indices for coffee sales compared to rice. These findings highlight the considerable concentration of water resources among large companies, particularly in the coffee sector. The paper emphasizes the importance of considering the environmental implications of corporate activities in food supply chains, providing valuable insights for sustainability efforts in the agri-food industry.

Producing more nutritious food with less resources, while preserving the natural ecosystems, is a key challenge of our society. In this paper we propose a macronutrient-based indicator of productivity, the nutrient land productivity ( NLP ), to measure the amount of calories, proteins, and fats produced per hectare of cropland. Over the period 1961−2016, we find that the global NLP has increased by 2.7–2.9% per year for calories and proteins, and between 2.1 and 4.6% for fats. However, such rates exhibit significant spatial patterns throughout the world depending on whether farmers adopted intensification (e.g. Eastern and South Asia, North America) or extensification (e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa) practices to boost nutrients production. Our outcomes, based on a production basket including 144 crops, show that cereals and pulses cultivations have been dominated by intensification practices coupled with a stable or decreasing harvested area. Conversely, for fruits and nuts cultivations extensification prevailed over intensification, while for oil crops most cultivations experienced a coupled action of the two practises. Finally, by coupling the NLP indicator with its nutrient water productivity ( NWP ) counterpart, we find that NWP has mainly changed following land patterns, with the exception of locations having undergone significant crop substitutions, namely from less toward more water demanding crops. Indeed, the transition toward perennial crops has increased the evapotranspiration demand over cultivated land by 14% on a global average.

Agricultural production exploits about 70% of all water withdrawals around the globe, but to date, it is not clear if and how this water consumption is taken into consideration in the price of the agricultural primary goods. To shed light on this point, we analyze the farm gate prices of twelve representative crops in the period 1991-2016, considering data from 162 countries in total. The crop price dependence on the water footprint is investigated, also accounting for the country’s water scarcity as a possible additional determinant of the price, and of the land footprint as a possible confounding factor. We find that prices of staple crops (e.g. wheat, maize, soybeans, and potatoes) typically embed the amount of water used for their production. Differently, food products that do not contribute in an essential way to the human diet and whose production is more export-oriented (e.g. coffee, cocoa beans, tea, vanilla) exhibit weaker or negligible water-price links. These variations may be ascribable to specific market dynamics related to the two product groups. Staple crops are often produced in markets where many producers have more space for price setting and may have an incentive to include also the value of water in the final crop price. In contrast, cash crops are cultivated in situations where few producers are ‘price takers’ with respect to the international market. This mechanism may decrease the influence of the water used on crop farm gate price composition. The understanding of different water impacts on crop prices may be useful for increasing efficiency in water allocation and governance decisions, with the aim of improved environmental sustainability in this domain.

We quantify the impact of food consumption on local and foreign water resources through an indicator of the environmental value of the riverine water. This indicator takes into account both the local environmental relevance of the fluvial area where water is withdrawn (biodiversity richness, riparian vegetation, sediment transport, etc) and the downstream effects of water withdrawals. In the 1986–2013 period, food consumption has more than doubled its impact on foreign riverine environments, but still the international trade reduces the pressure of food consumption on global river system by 11%, as compared to an ideal situation where all food is produced locally. We also show the geography of country (or individual) responsibility on the environmental changes of world rivers. Hotspots of food-related river-environment degradation are found in Australia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Spain.

The increasing global demand for farmland products is placing unprecedented pressure on the global agricultural system and its water resources. Many regions of the world, that are affected by a chronic water scarcity relative to their population, strongly depend on the import of agricultural commodities and associated embodied (or virtual ) water. The globalization of water through virtual water trade (VWT) is leading to a displacement of water use and a disconnection between human populations and the water resources they rely on. Despite the recognized importance of these phenomena in reshaping the patterns of water dependence through teleconnections between consumers and producers, their effect on global and regional water resources has just started to be quantified. This review investigates the global spatiotemporal dynamics, drivers, and impacts of VWT through an integrated analysis of surface water, groundwater, and root-zone soil moisture consumption for agricultural production; it evaluates how virtual water flows compare to the major ‘physical water fluxes’ in the Earth System; and provides a new reconceptualization of the hydrologic cycle to account also for the role of water redistribution by the hidden ‘virtual water cycle’.

Population growth, socio-economic development and climate changes are placing increasing pressure on water resources. Crop water footprint is a key indicator in the quantification of such pressure. It is determined by crop evapotranspiration and crop yield, which can be highly variable in space and time. While the spatial variability of crop water footprint has been the objective of several investigations, the temporal variability remains poorly studied. In particular, some studies approached this issue by associating the time variability of crop water footprint only to yield changes, while considering evapotranspiration patterns as marginal. Validation of this Fast Track approach has yet to be provided. In this Letter we demonstrate its feasibility through a comprehensive validation, an assessment of its uncertainty, and an example of application. Our results show that the water footprint changes are mainly driven by yield trends, while evapotranspiration plays a minor role. The error due to considering constant evapotranspiration is three times smaller than the uncertainty of the model used to compute the crop water footprint. These results confirm the suitability of the Fast Track approach and enable a simple, yet appropriate, evaluation of time-varying crop water footprint.

Human societies rely on food reserves and the importation of agricultural goods as means to cope with crop failures and associated food shortage. While food trade has been the subject of intensive investigations in recent years, food reserves remain poorly quantified. It is unclear how food stocks are changing and whether they are declining. In this study we use food stock records for 92 products to reconstruct 50 years of aggregated food reserves, expressed in caloric equivalent (kcal), at the regional and global scales. A detailed statistical analysis demonstrates that the overall regional and global per-capita food stocks are stationary, challenging a widespread impression that food reserves are shrinking. We develop a statistically-sound stochastic representation of stock dynamics and take the stock-halving probability as a measure of the natural variability of the process. We find that there is a 20% probability that the global per-capita stocks will be halved by 2050. There are, however, some strong regional differences: Western Europe and the region encompassing North Africa and the Middle East have smaller halving probabilities and smaller per-capita stocks, while North America and Oceania have greater halving probabilities and greater per-capita stocks than the global average. Africa exhibits low per-capita stocks and relatively high probability of stock halving by 2050, which reflects a state of higher food insecurity in this continent.

The trade of agricultural commodities can be associated with a virtual transfer of the local freshwater resources used for the production of these goods. Thus, trade of food products virtually transfers large amounts of water from areas of food production to far consumption regions, a process termed the ‘globalization of water’. We consider the (time-varying) community structure of the virtual water network for the years 1986–2008. The communities are groups of countries with dense internal connections, while the connections are sparser among different communities. Between 1986 and 2008, the ratio between virtual water flows within communities and the total global trade of virtual water has continuously increased, indicating the existence of well defined clusters of virtual water transfers. In some cases (e.g. Central and North America and Europe in recent years) the virtual water communities correspond to geographically coherent regions, suggesting the occurrence of an ongoing process of regionalization of water resources. However, most communities also include countries located on different ‘sides’ of the world. As such, geographic proximity only partly explains the community structure of virtual water trade. Similarly, the global distribution of people and wealth, whose effect on the virtual water trade is expressed through simple ‘gravity models’, is unable to explain the strength of virtual water communities observed in the past few decades. A gravity model based on the availability of and demand for virtual water in different countries has higher explanatory power, but the drivers of the virtual water fluxes are yet to be adequately identified.