Mapping and quantifying nature’s contributions to people underpinning international food trade: the case of the Brazilian coffee and soy supply-chains

Global food systems are dependent on nature’s contributions to people (NCP), yet the role of such contributions in international trade is largely underrecognised. Using publicly available data on the configuration of natural and cultural landscapes, we developed a spatially-explicit approach to map, quantify and trace a regulating NCP (wild pollination) and a non-material NCP (supporting identities) underpinning Brazilian coffee and soy supply-chains from producing municipalities to importing countries. Our approach for mapping supporting identities at large scales shows feasibility of using publicly available data for such an analysis. Our results show unequal NCP distributions across producing regions and trade flows. From the agricultural production potentially attributable to wild pollination, 74% was exported in the case of coffee, and 66% in the case of soy. The coffee and soy farm identities mapping indicates that soy producing landscapes are less diverse than coffee ones. For both products, the largest share of imports comes from municipalities with farm identities linked to lower agriculture-natural ecosystem integration. Results suggest that smallholder farmers rely more on wild pollination and therefore are potentially more vulnerable to ecosystem degradation. Our approach provides a framework to assess how NCP underpin food trade at finer spatial resolution and locates where and which supply chain actors can collaborate to support and leverage more sustainable uses of natural and cultural resources.