Beschreibung:
One of sustainable development’s key objectives is to ensure global food security. Trade in agri-food products will be a crucial component of adaptive responses to future global food insecurity. Trade in agri-food products, however, has significant environmental, economic, and climatic consequences. Ensuring the sustainability of agri-food trade is thus crucial. Assessing the sustainability of agri-food trade has proven to be a complex challenge due to numerous factors. Two key problems are a lack of frameworks available to quantitatively assess it and the ‘silo approach’ to resource management. The objective of this paper is to provide and utilise a comprehensive framework to assess the sustainability of agri-food trade. We hence propose Water-Energy-Food Land-Economy-Climate framework and use it to assess the sustainability of agri-food trade in South Africa. Despite exporting 25% more agri-food products than they imported, the results show that the production of agri-food imports required 65% more water, 3% more energy, and 44% more land than exports. Further, imports generated 98% more CO₂ and 103% more PO4 emissions than exports. South Africa also generated 64% more economic value from their agri-food exports than their imports cost. Overall, the results show that South Africa has a truly sustainable agri-food trade mix