Revealing the bilateral dependencies and policy implication of food production of Japan and China: From the perspective of Food-Energy-Water nexus

Abstract

The world food price crisis in 2007/08 has aroused worldwide attention to the global food price volatility and food self-sufficiency issues. This paper modelled the entire environment of food production and transaction from a holistic view by a Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus in order to reveal the hidden connections related to the food self-sufficiency issue, including the interdependencies of food production with its restraining factors (hybrid energy, hybrid water), other production sectors, and international exchanges. This paper mapped all direct and indirect flows in the FEW nexus and projected a potential Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) to figure out the impacts of policies on FEW nexus flows, nexus robustness, total input of all sectors, and household expenditures in Japan and China. The results show that the pattern of food-related extraction flows was more imbalanced than the pattern of hybrid energy flows, due to the high dependence of Japan on the food supply of China (16.11% of total food-related extractions). An ETS may increase Japan’s total household expenditure on imported goods from China in the fields of sugar refining (1.3096%), processing vegetable oils and fats (0.1164%), processing of meat cattle (0.1010%), as well as slightly decrease the system robustness of the total nexus.