Telecoupled impacts of livestock trade on non-communicable diseases

Chung and Liu Globalization and Health https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-019-0481-y (2019) 15:43 RESEARCH Open Access Telecoupled impacts of livestock trade on non-communicable diseases Min Gon Chung1,2 and Jianguo Liu1* Abstract Background: Non-communicable diseases (NCDs)—chronic human health problems such as cardiovascular diseases linked to poor diets—are significant challenges for sustainable development and human health. The international livestock trade increases accessibility to cheap animal products that may expand diet-related NCDs worldwide. However, it is not well understood how the complex interconnections among livestock production, trade, and consumption affect NCD risks around the world. Method: Our global dataset included 33 livestock products (meat, offal, and animal fats) in 156 countries from 1992 to 2011. We employed path analysis to uncover how livestock trade contributes to diet-related NCDs and identify underlying environmental and socioeconomic factors of livestock trade. Then we performed trend analyses to investigate long-term changes in livestock production and trade at a country level. Results: We found that livestock consumption through livestock import increased diet-related NCD risks. This was especially true in developing countries, which in general were not well prepared in terms of policies for NCD risk reduction, and where there was a lack of funding to implement the policies. Population size and income level were the main factors affecting global livestock import activities. Conclusions: Our results suggest that new governance structures to incorporate separate international efforts, improved national policies, and bolstering individual efforts are needed to decrease NCD risks, particularly in developing countries. Keywords: Livestock trade, Livestock consumption, Meat consumption, Non-communicable diseases, Telecoupling Background The increasing risks of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) have been recognized as significant health challenges around the globe [1–4]. In 2011, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted a political declaration to reduce and prevent NCDs [5]. In 2013, the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Action Plan on NCDs dealt with both behavioral and metabolic risk factors and considered the social and economic impacts of NCDs [6]. Additionally, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) rank NCDs as one of the core components that link human health and sustainable development [7–9]. Countries with continuous population and income growth have experienced a rapid nutrition transition * Correspondence: 1 Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48823, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article toward consuming more livestock products [1, 4, 10, 11]. But many countries cannot meet consumer demand for livestock through domestic production, and thus they are increasingly dependent on imported energy-dense animal products [12–14]. Livestock imports may lead to increases in the consumption of meat and animal fats, and thus NCD risks, especially cardiovascular diseases, type II diabetes, cancer, and chronic respiratory diseases [1, 15–18]. Consumption of livestock products such as fatty and processed meat is one of the major dietary risk factors for NCD incidence and mortality [4, 16, 19, 20]. For example, high meat consumption stands out as a strong contributor to colorectal cancer [21]. Additionally, diets high in processed meat are moderately linked with an increased risk for cardiovascular disease [19, 20, 22] and diabetes [23]. Although some countries have raised concern about livestock trade (e.g., cheap fatty meat) in relation to increases in diet-related NCDs [24– © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Chung and Liu Globalization and Health (2019) 15:43 26], little research has quantified or thoroughly explained how the complex interrelationships among livestock production, trade, and consumption affect dietrelated NCDs worldwide. Additionally, global livestock supply chains from producers to consumers make it complicated to quantify the impacts of livestock trade on NCDs across countries [27]. To fill this knowledge gap, our research objective was to investigate how livestock trade affects livestock consumption and the risks of NCDs, as well as which socioeconomic and environmental factors contribute to livestock production and trade. We also examined the role of agents (e.g., farmers and consumers) in facilitating or preventing livestock trade and consumption across countries. To guide our research, we used the integrated framework of telecoupling (socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances) [28], which helps explain complex interconnections among livestock production, trade, consumption, and the risks of NCDs simultaneously. This telecoupling framework allows analysis of the socioeconomic and environmental interconnections among two or more coupled human and natural systems over long distances [29]. This framework has been applied to a variety of important issues, such as trade (of food, energy, sand, and forest products) [30–33], land use and land cover change [34–36], species migration [37], tourism [32, 38], water transfer [39, 40], urbanization [41], wildlife transfer [32], foreign direct investment [42], payment for ecosystem services [43, 44], knowledge transfer [32], conservation [43–45], economic development [46], and fisheries [47, 48]. This is the first time, however, that this framework has been used in the context of livestock production, trade, consumption, and human health. Specifically, we evaluated the major components of the framework—effects (impacts of the trade on NCD risks and mortality) and causes (reasons behind the trade)— across 156 countries where livestock production and consumption occur. We included 33 livestock products that were divided into three groups (meat, offal, and animal fats). For detailed analysis, we chose four focal countries (Brazil, China, the UK, and the USA) to represent different groups for livestock production, trade, consumption, and risks of NCDs around the world. We evaluated flows (amounts of traded livestock) and agents (entities that facilitate trade) in these four focal countries. Methods Components of the telecoupling framework The tel (...truncated)