Increasing trade between countries and gains in income have given consumers around the world access to a richer and more diverse set of commercial plant products (i.e., foods and fibers produced by farmers). According to the economic theory of comparative advantage, countries open to trade will be able to consume more–in terms of volume and diversity–if they concentrate production on commodities that they can most cost-effectively produce, while importing goods that are expensive to produce, relative to other countries. Here, we perform a global analysis of traded commercial plant products and find little evidence that increasing globalization has incentivized agricultural specialization. Instead, a country’s plant production and consumption patterns are still largely determined by local evolutionary legacies of plant diversification. Because tropical countries harbor a greater diversity of lineages across the tree of life than temperate countries, tropical countries produce and consume a greater diversity of plant products than do temperate countries. In contrast, the richer and more economically advanced temperate countries have the capacity to produce and consume more plant species than the generally poorer tropical countries, yet this collection of plant species is drawn from fewer branches on the tree of life. Why have countries not increasingly specialized in plant production despite the theoretical financial incentive to do so? Potential explanations include the persistence of domestic agricultural subsidies that distort production decisions, cultural preferences for diverse local food production, and that diverse food production protects rural households in developing countries from food price shocks. Less specialized production patterns will make crop systems more resilient to zonal climatic and social perturbations, but this may come at the expense of global crop production efficiency, an important step in making the transition to a hotter and more crowded world.
Department of Economics, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, United States of America;Center for Biodiversity, Department of Biology, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America;Department of Ecological Sciences—Animal Ecology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands;Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America;Institute on Environment, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America;Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America;Institute on Environment, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America;Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America;Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America;Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America;Department of Biological Sciences, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., United States of America;Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America;Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America;Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States of America;Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America;National Socio-environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), University of Maryland, Annapolis, Maryland, United States of America
Recommended Citation:
Erik J. Nelson,Matthew R. Helmus,Jeannine Cavender-Bares,et al. Commercial Plant Production and Consumption Still Follow the Latitudinal Gradient in Species Diversity despite Economic Globalization[J]. PLOS ONE,2016-01-01,11(10)