One of humanity’s major challenges of the 21st century will be meeting future food demands on an increasingly resource constrained-planet. Global food production will have to rise by 70 percent between 2000 and 2050 to meet effective demand which poses major challenges to food production systems. Doing so without compromising environmental integrity is an even greater challenge. This study looks at the interdependencies between land and water resources, agricultural production and environmental outcomes in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), an area of growing importance in international agricultural markets. Special emphasis is given to the role of LAC’s agriculture for (a) global food security and (b) environmental sustainability. We use the International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT)—a global dynamic partial equilibrium model of the agricultural sector—to run different future production scenarios, and agricultural trade regimes out to 2050, and assess changes in related environmental indicators. Results indicate that further trade liberalization is crucial for improving food security globally, but that it would also lead to more environmental pressures in some regions across Latin America. Contrasting land expansion versus more intensified agriculture shows that productivity improvements are generally superior to agricultural land expansion, from an economic and environmental point of view. Finally, our analysis shows that there are trade-offs between environmental and food security goals for all agricultural development paths.

The literature that addresses the role of institutions in bilateral trade is extensive. However, research that links institutional quality to specific products and their different levels of value addition is lacking. In this study, we look into institutional quality, based on three indicators from the World Bank's world governance indicators, and its indicator‐specific effects on bilateral coconut trade. In particular, we study coconut products with varying degrees of value addition. We use structural gravity models to measure how institutions affect the trade performance of the top 26 coconut producing countries to the top 15 importing economies over the years 1996–2016. Our results suggest that increased government effectiveness enhances trade of high‐value products, whereas better voice and accountability scores decrease trade of coconut products with both levels of value addition. No clear trade effect is observed when two countries are more similar in each of the three indicators. We conclude that each indicator has different trade effects on each of the coconut product categories. We end by giving recommendations that will help to improve the coconut export performance in their respective countries and for future research.

With increasing global agrifood trade, private food standards and certifications have proliferated. Yet, their trade effects remain ambiguous. We provide further empirical evidence by assessing the effect of GlobalGAP certification on agrifood exports to high-value markets in EU and OECD countries. Empirically, we estimate a structural gravity model-that accounts for zero trade and endogeneity of certification-using a novel dataset of certified producers and land area cultivated to apples, bananas, and grapes from 2010 to 2015. While our results generally confirm the trade-enhancing effect of GlobalGAP certification for both developed and developing countries, we show that the effects vary across products.

Some rural regions of Peru showed remarkable rates of poverty reduction and inequality reduction between 2004 and 2012, while others lagged behind. Using microsimulation-based decompositions, we analyse the driving forces behind these trends, finding that rural poverty and inequality reductions are mainly attributable to increasing labour incomes in Peru's agricultural sector and, to a smaller extent, increasing public transfers. In earlier years, higher returns to experience drive these results, while in later years, increasing staple-crop yields and prices are of key importance. Further, remuneration of working hours increases in reaction to labour-supply shortages in rural areas. The accompanying rising incomes and non-agricultural job creation is less pro-poor than would be ideal, as they benefit more highly skilled workers. Further, shrinking farm sizes hampers poverty reduction and income-inequality reduction. Policies should target the participation of the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article