Better Ways to Reduce Potential Environmental Implications on Food Miles of Major Imported Grains
Abstract
The global discrepancies between production and demand have rapidly increased international food trade amounts. The U.S., which occupies 39% of corn and 18% of wheat in the global market, is the major exporter of agricultural products to South Korea. People in the U.S. and South Korea are concerned with environmental impacts across complex supply chain of international trade of both countries. Suppliers engaged in distribution processes of food and feed contribute over 50% of carbon emissions and other environmental impacts of products. Recent studies for food trade show that global food trade can contribute the whole environmental impacts of agricultural products. Trade can cause environmental impacts along production and trade route and increase food miles. Food miles mainly focus on calculating greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) but food trade recently raises the arguments for energy consumption. The international food trade can exchange not only agricultural products but also energy in various stages for production and transportation. Generally, food miles means the energy that spent on shipping considering imports and transport distance. Thus, the larger the food miles, the greater the energy consumption, which means the greater the environmental impacts. The purpose of this study is to evaluate life cycle environmental implications of major agricultural products for the food miles of international trade between South Korea and the U.S. This study examines not only GHG emissions related to climate change but also other important impact categories such as eutrophication, acidification, human toxicity, etc. In addition, we evaluate environmental benefits through tradeoff between beef and corn.
Acknowledgement This research was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea (NFR) grant funded by the Korea government (Ministry of Science and ICT) (NO. NRF-2017R1E1A1A01078227).- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMGC43I1631W
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES