Optimization of national food production layout based on comparative advantage index

Abstract

A large amount of land and water was needed for food production. In China, the geographical mismatch of land and water resources is increasing the structural tensions among spatial water and land reallocation in national food supply chain. Unreasonable national food production layout would threat land and water security. To improve food production self-sufficiency, an optimization model of national food production layout was established based on the agricultural food production comparative advantage index (ACI) and the linear programming optimization. ACI was built based on the local land, water endowment and socio-economic features, to evaluate the suitability for agricultural food production in each province. In this study, the objective function is maximization of the provincial agricultural food production comparative advantage index, and minimization of the provincial water and land footprint of agricultural food production. The constraint condition includes the natural resources, social demand, ecological environment and production condition. The optimal results showed that the maize production in Tianjin, Shanxi and Shaanxi has an obvious decrease and the production of soybean in Guangdong, Hainan and Yunnan increase after optimization. The corresponding adapting strategy was suggested to ensure the land, water security as well as sustainable food supplying. The objective of this study is to illustrate how an optimization model could be possibly used to adapt unreasonable food production layout for achieving the synergies between land, water and food.