Carbon Border Climate Governance and Agrifood Export Competitiveness: A Narrative Integrative Review of Decarbonization, Digital Traceability and Food System Resilience Under Geopolitical Fragmentation

Abstract

Climate policy, carbon-border governance, digital traceability requirements and geopolitical fragmentation are creating new adjustment pressures on agrifood value chains. Yet agrifood products remain largely outside the direct legal scope of the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) at the time of writing, making it necessary to separate formal legal coverage from indirect exposure through inputs, reporting practices, buyer governance and energy systems. This paper develops a narrative integrative review and mechanism-based evidence synthesis of how carbon-border climate governance may affect agrifood export competitiveness and food-system resilience.

The evidence base combines versioned legal and institutional materials, including EUR-Lex, the European Commission, FAO, OECD, WTO, UNCTAD, the World Bank and the IEA, with recent peer-reviewed literature on agrifood value chains, resilience, traceability and sustainable trade. Rather than estimating a common causal effect, the paper identifies recurrent channels and the conditions under which competitiveness pressures are more or less likely to emerge. Four synthesis-derived propositions follow. First, current CBAM relevance for agrifood is mainly indirect, especially through fertilizers, electricity, carbon-intensive materials and buyer-side disclosure demands. Second, competitiveness under carbon-sensitive trade increasingly depends on the complementarity between decarbonization capability and digital traceability capability. Third, resilience is better understood as adaptive openness under risk management than as either frictionless globalism or autarky. Fourth, policy responses are strongest when low-carbon energy, measurement-reporting-verification infrastructure, digital interoperability, risk-aware trade governance and support for smaller actors are aligned. The paper contributes a more disciplined analytical framework for studying carbon-sensitive agrifood trade while clarifying legal scope, evidentiary limits and priority areas for future empirical research