China’s Food Security and Water, Fertilizer, Pesticide, and GHG Saving through Crop Redistribution

In an age of climate change and resource scarcity, long-term high-intensity water, fertilizer and pesticide use leads to serious environmental pollution, which seriously threatens China's food security. It is a huge challenge to provide adequate food for the increasing population while ensuring agriculture’s sustainability. We use a large-scale linear programming model based on big data of agricultural production provided by the SPAM database to study the impacts of cropping redistribution on water (blue and green water), fertilizer (nitrogen, phosphorus, kalium, and compound fertilizer), pesticide, and GHG emission saving in China. Then we build a GTAP model to stimulate effects of cropping redistribution on crops’ prices and incomes. We find that China’s blue and green water will be saved by 24.3% and 17.5%, respectively, while ensuring China’s food security, guaranteeing farmers’ incomes, and limiting the expansion of arable land. Meanwhile, the requirement of fertilizer (nitrogen, 19.8%; phosphate, 26.6%; kalium, 9.8%; compound fertilizer, 15.6%) and pesticide (12.3%) will be decreased synchronously. And this number in specific regions are more dramatic, the nitrogen fertilizer used in Shaanxi will be saved by 46.9%, which will effectively alleviate soil eutrophication there. Accompanied with resource demand reducing, GHGs will be decreased by 12.3%, making a remarkable contribution to climate change mitigation. We concluded that there is a large space for saving agricultural resource and emission in China, and cropping redistribution is an effective measure to solve this problem without changing the initial endowment of resources. In terms of policy implications, we argue that more attention should be paid to crop redistribution when designing global solutions for ameliorating resource scarcity. It provides a feasible solution with broad implications for seeking sustainable agricultural development around the world.