Abstract
China produces 28% of global rice supply and is currently self-sufficient despite a massive rural-to-urban demographic transition that drives intense competition for land and water resources. At issue is whether it will remain self-sufficient, which depends on the potential to raise yields on existing rice land. Here we report a detailed spatial analysis of rice production potential in China and evaluate scenarios to 2030. We find that China is likely to remain self-sufficient in rice assuming current yield and consumption trajectories and no reduction in production area. A focus on increasing yields of double-rice systems on general, and in three single-rice provinces where yield gaps are relatively large, would provide greatest return on investments in research and development to remain self-sufficient. Discrepancies between results from our detailed bottom-up yield-gap analysis and those derived following a top-down methodology show that the two approaches would result in very different research and development priorities.
Highlights
China produces 28% of global rice supply and is currently self-sufficient despite a massive rural-to-urban demographic transition that drives intense competition for land and water resources
That small changes in projected Chinese rice production would have a large impact on global rice trade highlights the need for accurate estimates of potential production on existing rice area
The spatial resolution of our yield-gap analysis by climate zone, province, and cropping system is essential to adequately inform policies and strategic plans for food security and land use. For this reason our analysis (i) distinguishes between the two major rice cropping systems, (ii) utilizes a rice simulation model that has been rigorously validated for the ability to estimate potential yield across the major rice-growing regions in China (Supplementary Materials, Supplementary Figs. 3–5), (iii) relies on at least 10 years of measured weather data (Supplementary Materials, Supplementary Fig. 1), and (iv) employs a bottom-up scaling protocol validated for capacity to reproduce crop performance across large variation in climate[9,10]
Summary
China produces 28% of global rice supply and is currently self-sufficient despite a massive rural-to-urban demographic transition that drives intense competition for land and water resources. It has not been possible to perform such a detailed analysis due to lack of both a spatially explicit dataset on rice production systems across this wide range of environments, and a suitable upscaling technique for aggregating results to a national scale To fill this void, we report a spatially explicit yield-gap analysis of Chinese rice production using primary data and bottom-up scaling methods recently developed for the Global Yield Gap Atlas (GYGA) (www.yieldgap.org)[9,10]. We report a spatially explicit yield-gap analysis of Chinese rice production using primary data and bottom-up scaling methods recently developed for the Global Yield Gap Atlas (GYGA) (www.yieldgap.org)[9,10] In this yield-gap analysis, we evaluate future scenario options based on estimated rice production capacity on current Chinese rice area, identifying specific regions and rice production systems that deserve highest priority for research and development investments to achieve greatest rice production on a limited supply of prime farmland. Discrepancies between results from our detailed yield-gap analysis and those derived following a top-down methodology indicate that the two approaches would result in very different research and development priorities
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