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 com

SUBMITTER: Dalin C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4403195 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature