Allocation of grassland, livestock and arable based on the spatial and temporal analysis for food demand in China

Abstract

To explore the distribution of food demand and the projected trend in future food demand in China, this paper analyzed the change in current (1998–2012) per-capita demand for grain, grain-consuming and herbivorous livestock products, and predicted the food demand in 2020. The results indicated that in 1998–2012, the national per-capita consumption of grain ration declined by about 36.66%, and the per-capita consumption of grain-consu-ming and herbivorous livestock products increased by about 48% and 34.09%, respectively. The grain-consu-ming livestock products have become the primary source of both calories and protein for consumers. The proportion of herbivorous livestock products in consumer diets has increased steadily and there has been huge potential in substituting beef and mutton for pork in this dynamic market. The demand for food in different provinces of China is highly variable, which is important for planning grassland agriculture development and ensuring food safety. The demand for grain, and grain-consuming and herbivorous livestock products will increase by about 3.3%, 20% and 14% respectively by 2020. Based on the food demand and trend in the development of grassland agriculture, the 31 provinces in China are divided into three priority groups for grassland agriculture development.

Keywords

arable land equivalent unit (ALEU) / food equivalent unit (FEU) / food security / grassland agriculture / time trend prediction

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Supplementary materials

The online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2017140 contains supplementary materials (Tables S1–S3).

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the English editorial work of Boya Lin, a master candidate at University of Florida. Thanks specially go to the anonymous reviewer who kindly helped the authors to amend the manuscript to an acceptable level of English. The research was supported by the key project “Study of the Dynamic Market Equilibrium in Substituting Beef and Mutton for Pork” by the State Key Laboratory of Grassland Agro-ecosystems (SKLGAE201502) and Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT13019).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Huilong Lin, Ruichao Li, Yifan Liu, Jingrong Zhang, and Jizhou Ren declare that they have no conflict of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2017. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)