Divergent ecological consequences of global agricultural trade: evidence from the ecosystem service trade-off intensity index

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Global agricultural trade has become a major driver of land-use change and ecosystem service alteration, but the absence of a composite indicator characterising the intensity of trade-offs among multiple services constrains the monitoring of its multidimensional ecological impacts. This study constructed and validated the Trade-off Intensity Index (TII), quantifying the dispersion of the standardised supply–demand ratios of four services—food production, carbon sequestration, water yield and soil conservation—on the global 1 km grid over 2000–2020, and used a two-way fixed-effects model to identify the telecoupled effects of soybean and maize trade on national ecosystem service trade-offs. The main findings are as follows. (1) The ecological consequences of trade exhibited pronounced North–South divergence: developed countries decoupled trade growth from ecological imbalance through environmental pressure displacement, whereas developing net exporters bore structural imbalance risks. (2) The effects were crop-specific: soybean exports were the principal driver of ecological imbalance in developing countries, whereas maize trade showed no significant disruptive effect. (3) Historical attribution indicated that soybean export expansion offset approximately 33.32% of the potential ecological improvement in developing net exporters. As a diagnostic tool, the TII captures multidimensional structural degradation that single indicators cannot reflect, and provides a transferable framework for monitoring telecoupled ecological change beyond agricultural trade; these findings support coordinated green supply-chain governance to counter ecologically unequal exchange.