Water resources transfers through Chinese interprovincial and foreign food trade.

ABSTRACT: China's water resources are under increasing pressure from socioeconomic development, diet shifts, and climate change. Agriculture still concentrates most of the national water withdrawal. Moreover, a spatial mismatch in water and arable land availability--with abundant agricultural land and little water resources in the north--increases water scarcity and results in virtual water transfers from drier to wetter regions through agricultural trade. We use a general equilibrium welfare model and linear programming optimization to model interprovincial food trade in China. We combine these trade flows with province-level estimates of commodities' virtual water content to build China's domestic and foreign virtual water trade network. We observe large variations in agricultural water-use effici

SUBMITTER: Dalin C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4103381 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature