Impact Of Household Food Consumption On Water Resources Demand

China's situation of water resource is faced with increasingly serious challenges from both supply and demand ends.At the production end,due to the restrictions in low per capita quantity of water resources and discordance between water resource distribution and production distribution,China has made continuous efforts to explore ways for effective management and efficient utilization of water resources,but we have encountered problems of small exploration potential,big difficulty and high cost.At the demand end,with the continuous rise of Chinese residents' income level and dramatic increase of the total supply level of agricultural production,Chinese residents have comprehensively solved the problem of food and clothing within 40 years.Meanwhile,foodborne diseases like overweight,obesity and nutrition imbalance have happened to more and more people.This will not only reduce individual and family welfare,but also consume a large number of public health resources and result in the huge loss of social welfare objectively.From the large number of results of nutrition research,the main cause of this situation is excessive intake of animal products.In addition,studies in the field of ecology and environmental science have shown that,such products will consume far more water and soil resources than other agricultural products(such as cereals and vegetables)in the production and supply process.Then there comes a question naturally.Can we explore an approach beneficial to both healthy diet and sustainable utilization of water resources from the demand side?In order to answer this question,three aspects were chosen as the research contents in this paper.First,the food consumption structure and variation trend of Chinese urban and rural residents were combed and analyzed systematically.By combining water resource distribution and production distribution in China,the author made an in-depth analysis on China's international dependence in main food and water resource demands from the angle of international trade,so as to lay a foundation for further analyzing water resource security behind food consumption(Chapter 2 and Chapter 3).Second,the water footprint characteristics of food consumption were analyzed,and through establishing the food consumption system model(Chapter 4).Third,an in-depth analysis was made on how three core driving factors influence water footprint by influencing residents' food consumption,simulation and prediction were conducted for changes of water demands for food consumption brought about by income increase,aging and price,so as to provide scientific evidences and feasible decision-making opinions for exploring measures to efficiently utilize water resources from the consumer end(Chapter 5 and Chapter 6).The empirical analysis data applied in this paper mainly come from the recorded consumption data survey of one week about 2,023 households in 10 Chinese cities made by the author's team from 2009 to 2012.Compared with plenty of existing literatures about water footprint of food consumption,this study covers the following three aspects at least in innovation.Firstly,this study has established a bridge between social and economic factors and resource-environmental pressure through building a food demand system,making it possible to explore approaches of relieving the pressure of water resource supply and demand from the demand end of food consumption.Hence,we can not only analyze how the changes of various social and economic factors influence resources and environment by influencing the food consumption structure at the micro level,but also overcome the limitation of the traditional method which investigates food security from the dimension of food supply quantity.Therefore,the measurement of food security has been expanded to the dimension of resource and environment security.Such linkage has objectively overcome an important defect in previous studies.Economists study the changes of food consumption demand only,but ignore the hidden pressure on resources;ecologists and resource scientists only investigate the influence of food supply and demand on resources,but pay no attention to the socio-economic driving forces behind the changes of food demand.Secondly,data applied in this paper not only include detailed consumption situations of households at home,but also cover outside consumption situations that were often ignored due to the difficulty of data collection in previous studies.As a result,our measurement about food demand becomes more perfect.Thirdly,in terms of the empirical approach,we applied the 2-step QUAIDS model of consistent estimator to overcome the nil expenditure problem in sample data,which can guarantee the consistency and unbiasedness of model parameter estimation.The major conclusions of this study are as follows.(1)With the increase of income,residents' food consumption will present a trend of continuous rise,and turn into outside consumption from consumption at home.Residents' food consumption structure will keep changing,and the proportion of meat and fruit consumption will increase continuously.In addition,further analysis on meat consumption shows that the proportion of aquatic product and poultry meat consumption in meat consumption will further increase,and residents' demand for livestock meat will decrease.(2)The water footprint of residents'food consumption shows a development tendency of increase at a decreasing rate with the rise of income.Specifically,as the income rises continuously,the pressure of water resource supply and demand brought about by the changes of food consumption structure will be further increased.Such pressure will be relieved gradually in 2027,and the peak of water demand will be reached.(3)Contrary to the action of income increase,population aging has an obviously negative effect on the water footprint of food consumption in China.This means that,with the rapid aging of our society,the pressure on water resources caused by food demand will be relieved.(4)According to the elastic analysis on residents' food consumption and water footprint estimation,it is feasible to conduct water demand management via price mechanism from the consumption end.For instance,by increasing the meat price of consumption at home by 10%,we can reduce the water footprint of consumption for every kilogram of food by 5.2%.However,the price intervention scheme not considering the individual dietary pattern is very likely to advance residents' food consumption structure toward a direction deviating from balanced diet in the intervention process.(5)China becomes increasingly dependent on external water resources to meet the rising total demand in the country,and attention should be paid to the importance of virtual water trade in water resource management.(6)Residents' outside food consumption often ignored in previous literatures occupies a significant position in water footprint estimation of residents' food consumption.Ignoring outside consumption and its difference from consumption at home in food consumption structure will result in remarkable underestimation of water demand for food consumption.