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Abstract Global agricultural trade, production, and harvested area have steadily increased between 1961 and 2021. In this paper, we construct, decompose, and compare various measures of global physical crop yield that rely on countries’ crop area, production, and trade weights that vary over time. We document how the composition of exports and imports irrespective of the particular drivers of globalization is skewed towards higher crop yields compared to the changing international patterns of countries’ production as evidenced by the distribution of harvested area and production. We also document how the physical yield of exporting countries has consistently surpassed that of importing countries, indicating as well how a globalized world in which countries can trade and alter the pattern of crop production offers a way to ensure that worldwide higher-yield crops are being consumed. As such, the increasingly globalized agricultural sector with its many drivers of trade substitutes for and/or complements efforts to close the yield gap by upgrading countries crop production methods. For the exercise, we use national-scale data for 60 years from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. 

Abstract The United States and China are key nations in global agricultural and food trade. They share a complex bilateral agri-food trade network in which disruptions could have a global ripple effect. Yet, we do not understand the spatially resolved connections in the bilateral US–China agri-food trade. In this study, we estimate the bilateral agri-food trade between Chinese provinces and U.S. states and counties. First, we estimate bilateral imports and exports of agri-food commodities for provinces and states. Second, we model link-level connections between provinces and states/counties. To do this, we develop a novel algorithm that integrates a variety of national and international databases for the year 2017, including trade data from the US Census Bureau, the US Freight Analysis Framework database, and Multi-Regional Input-Output tables for China. We then adapt the food flow model for inter-county agri-food movements within the US to estimate bilateral trade through port counties. We estimate 2,954 and 162,922 link-level connections at the state-province and county-province resolution, respectively, and identify core nodes in the bilateral agri-food trade network. Our results provide a spatially detailed mapping of the US–China bilateral agri-food trade, which may enable future research and inform decision-makers.