Erasmus zu Ermgassen is a food system scientist investigating three broad topics within the area of sustainable agriculture: [i] Where does your food come from? [ii] What are the impacts of corporate and government efforts to make the production and trade of agricultural commodities such as beef, cocoa, soy, and oil palm, more sustainable? [iii] How can we reduce the environmental impact of the livestock sector? For these research questions Erasmus combines data and insights on supply chain logistics and trade, economics, life cycle assessment (LCA), and spatial analysis to increase transparency about the flow and impacts of foods around the world. Erasmus has a MA and VetMB (Veterinary Medicine), MRes (Food Security), and PhD (Sustainable Livestock) from the University of Cambridge, UK, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Earth and Climate Institute at UCLouvain, Belgium.
A new paper in Environmental Research Letters uses publicly-available remote-sensing and supply chain data for Côte d'Ivoire, the world's largest cocoa producer, to quantify cocoa-driven deforestation and trace 2019 cocoa exports and the associated deforestation from their department of origin, via trading companies, to international markets.
A new article in PNAS brings together detailed data on trade, agriculture, and logistics to produce a subnational map of the origin of Brazil’s exports of beef, offal, and live cattle. The work gives an unprecedented insight into the origin of food and impacts embedded in global supply chains.
GLP Members look at the soy trade in Brazil, the world's largest exporter, to analyze supply chain stickiness and explain why it is essential to curb deforestation. The research was published in One Earth.
