Effects of the international soybean trade on the dynamics of Gross Primary Productivity in soybean-producing regions in China and Brazil

The international trade of agricultural commodities, such as soybean, is driven by a series of pull and push factors linked to market demand. These in turn fluctuate based on changes in economic affluence, infrastructure development, and socioeconomic homogenization, among others, in both sending and receiving systems. While many studies have analyzed some of these push/pull factors and their environmental effects in either sending or receiving systems, few studies have assessed these effects simultaneously in both sending and receiving systems. This study evaluates the effects of the soybean trade between Brazil and China on the spatio-temporal patterns of gross primary productivity (GPP) in both sending and receiving systems. The GPP is a measure of the amount of biomass produced through photosynthesis across space and through time. This metric is directly related with the amount of carbon that is sequestered from the atmosphere, and thus is related with the impacts of land use/cover dynamics on global climate change. The spatio-temporal patterns of both GPP and land use/cover were evaluated simultaneously in two soybean-producing regions (state of Mato Grosso in Brazil, and Heilongjiang province in China) through the use of surface reflectance data acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard NASA's Terra satellite, combined with a production efficiency model (PEM) entirely based on remotely sensed data. Results from this analysis provide new insights on the consequences of the international trade at local/regional scales, and allow assessing how changes in market demand for agricultural commodities may generate drastic environmental effects in both sending and receiving systems, with global implications on carbon sequestration and thus on climate change.