Georges Lemaître Earth and Climate Research Centre, Earth and Life Institute, UCLouvain, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;
Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, B-1000 Brussels, Belgium.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Dec 15;117(50):31770-31779. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2003270117. Epub 2020 Dec 1.
Though the international trade in agricultural commodities is worth more than $1.6 trillion/year, we still have a poor understanding of the supply chains connecting places of production and consumption and the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of this trade. In this study, we provide a wall-to-wall subnational map of the origin and supply chain of Brazilian meat, offal, and live cattle exports from 2015 to 2017, a trade worth more than $5.4 billion/year. Brazil is the world's largest beef exporter, exporting approximately one-fifth of its production, and the sector has a notable environmental footprint, linked to one-fifth of all commodity-driven deforestation across the tropics. By combining official per-shipment trade records, slaughterhouse export licenses, subnational agricultural statistics, and data on the origin of cattle per slaughterhouse, we mapped the flow of cattle from more than 2,800 municipalities where cattle were raised to 152 exporting slaughterhouses where they were slaughtered, via the 204 exporting and 3,383 importing companies handling that trade, and finally to 152 importing countries. We find stark differences in the subnational origin of the sourcing of different actors and link this supply chain mapping to spatially explicit data on cattle-associated deforestation, to estimate the "deforestation risk" (in hectares/year) of each supply chain actor over time. Our results provide an unprecedented insight into the global trade of a deforestation-risk commodity and demonstrate the potential for improved supply chain transparency based on currently available data.
尽管农产品国际贸易价值超过 1.6 万亿美元/年，但我们对连接生产地和消费地的供应链以及这种贸易的社会经济和环境影响仍缺乏了解。在这项研究中，我们提供了一幅 2015 年至 2017 年巴西肉类、内脏和活牛出口的起源和供应链的全国性地图，该贸易价值超过 54 亿美元/年。巴西是世界上最大的牛肉出口国，出口了大约五分之一的产量，该行业对环境有显著的影响，与热带地区所有商品驱动的森林砍伐的五分之一有关。通过结合每批货物的官方贸易记录、屠宰场出口许可证、国家以下一级农业统计数据以及每头屠宰牛的来源数据，我们绘制了从 2800 多个饲养牛的城市到 152 个出口屠宰场的牛的流动图，这些牛是通过 204 家出口公司和 3383 家进口公司进行贸易的，最后到达 152 个进口国家。我们发现不同行为者的采购的来源在国家以下一级存在明显差异，并将这种供应链图与牛相关的森林砍伐的空间明确数据联系起来，以估计每个供应链行为者随着时间的推移的“森林砍伐风险”（公顷/年）。我们的研究结果提供了对一种具有森林砍伐风险的商品的全球贸易的前所未有的深入了解，并展示了基于现有数据提高供应链透明度的潜力。
