title: Balancing water resource conservation and food security in China.
abstract: China's economic growth is expected to continue into the next decades, accompanied by sustained urbanization and industrialization. The associated increase in demand for land, water resources, and rich foods will deepen the challenge of sustainably feeding the population and balancing agricultural and environmental policies. We combine a hydrologic model with an economic model to project China's future food trade patterns and embedded water resources by 2030 and to analyze the effects of targeted irrigation reductions on this system, notably on national agricultural water consumption and food self-sufficiency. We simulate interprovincial and international food trade with a general equilibrium welfare model and a linear programming optimization, and we obtain province-level estimates of commodities' virtual water content with a hydrologic model. We find that reducing irrigated land in regions highly dependent on scarce river flow and nonrenewable groundwater resources, such as Inner Mongolia and the greater Beijing area, can improve the efficiency of agriculture and trade regarding water resources. It can also avoid significant consumption of irrigation water across China (up to 14.8 km(3)/y, reduction by 14%), while incurring relatively small decreases in national food self-sufficiency (e.g., by 3% for wheat). Other researchers found that a national, rather than local, water policy would have similar effects on food production but would only reduce irrigation water consumption by 5%.
authors.affiliation: Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom; Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; c.a.dalin@lse.ac.uk irodrigu@princeton.edu.
authors.forename: Carole
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dalin
authors.affiliation: School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China;
authors.forename: Huanguang
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Qiu
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan; and.
authors.forename: Naota
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Hanasaki
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544.
authors.forename: Denise L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Mauzerall
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; c.a.dalin@lse.ac.uk irodrigu@princeton.edu.
authors.forename: Ignacio
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Rodriguez-Iturbe
mesh_terms: D057914:Agricultural Irrigation / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends; D000383:Agriculture / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends; D000465:Algorithms; D002681:China; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D005523:Food Supply; D005843:Geography; D060587:Groundwater; D007221:Industry / Q000639:trends; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D014507:Urbanization / Q000639:trends; D014872:Water Movements; D062066:Water Resources; D014881:Water Supply
keywords: food trade; sustainable agriculture; trade policy; virtual water; water saving
references.citation: Science. 2012 Aug 10;337(6095):649-50
references.pmid: 22879488
references.citation: Science. 2000 Jul 14;289(5477):284-8
references.pmid: 10894773
references.citation: Genome Res. 2009 Sep;19(9):1639-45
references.pmid: 19541911
references.citation: J Exp Bot. 2011 Mar;62(6):1709-13
references.pmid: 21421704
references.citation: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Apr 17;109(16):5989-94
references.pmid: 22474363
references.citation: J Environ Manage. 2008 Apr;87(1):14-25
references.pmid: 17339073
references.citation: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Nov 1;102(44):15715-20
references.pmid: 16249337
references.citation: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Mar 4;111(9):3239-44
references.pmid: 24344283
references.citation: Science. 2001 Apr 13;292(5515):281-4
references.pmid: 11303102
references.citation: Nature. 2010 Sep 2;467(7311):43-51
references.pmid: 20811450
references.citation: Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2006 May 29;361(1469):835-42
references.pmid: 16767828
references.citation: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jul 8;111(27):9774-9
references.pmid: 24958864
references.citation: Science. 2003 Nov 28;302(5650):1524-8
references.pmid: 14645837