Urbanization, Agricultural Water Use, and Regional and National Crop Production in China
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The overall goal of this paper is to analyze the impacts of the urbanization on regional
and national agricultural production through its impact on water use in agriculture in China.
Given the historical trend of water use in agriculture and its correlation with urbanization, the
change in agricultural water use due to urbanization is estimated. Then the impacts of this
change on regional crop production are simulated based on the China Water Simulation
Model (CWSM). Within CWSM, a positive mathematical programming (PMP) optimizes
water allocation among crops and between irrigated and rainfed areas within a crop in each of
ten river basins in China. The results show that water use in China has an obvious increasing
trend, particularly in the industrial and domestic sectors, while the share of water use in
agricultural sector has been dropping. A 1-percentage-point increase in urbanization can
result in a 0.47 percentage-point decline in share of water use. Based on the model simulation,
this will lead to the further decrease of irrigated areas and the increase of rainfed areas at both
the national and river basin levels, particularly for water intensive crops (such as rice and
wheat). Accordingly, average yields and total production will also decrease. A river basin
with large production of either rice or wheat (or both) decreases more in irrigated area as
urban area expands. Adaptation measures are recommended for both authorities and farmers
to ensure food security, such as providing incentive for farmers to adopt water saving
technology, implementing appropriate institutional and policy innovations (e.g, water use
association, water pricing and water use rights).