Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in international trade have risen sharply over the last few decades because of the globalization of economies and countries’ productive specialization. We have built a model able to trace all agro-food emissions along global value chains for 1986–2013. The results show that while the domestic fraction of food emissions has slightly decreased, the foreign fraction has grown by 75%, accounting for 24% of all agro-food emissions today. A few supply chains concentrate most of this increase, with consumption of animal products explaining 70% of all embodied emissions in trade. It was also found that higher incomes resulted in higher percentages of foreign agro-food emissions, and that increasing the proportion of imports in these footprints can be associated with lower per capita emissions. Because trade increasingly redistributes agro-food emissions around the world, national mitigation efforts should be complemented with strong international and coordinated cooperation actions.