International Industrial Ecology Day 2021

In the past two decades, Chinese agricultural production grew rapidly, with a tripled increase in total economic output from 2000 to 2017. However, expanding large-scale production also leads to substantial consumption of water resources. That means China has been faced with a sharp contradiction between food demand and water resources supply. Using the provincial panel data of China from 2008 to 2019, this study adopts the slacked based model to measure the country’s green agricultural water use efficiency (GAWUE). We also employ the Tobit model to identify the main factors that influence GAWUE. The results show that: (1) the GAWUEs in the area north of the Black River - Teng Chong line(BR-TC line) is always low, while the ones in the south of BR-TC line is beyond moderate level, (2) the GAWUEs in the east, middle and northeast regions showed a trend of inverted U shape, and the western region remained stable. Since 2011, the GAWUEs in all regions have shown a downward trend. (3) Compared with natural resource endowments, industrial structure has an obviously enhancement on the GAWUEs. Agricultural industry cannot obtain the capacity of self-reliance in China, even farmers gradually gain higher incomes. Thus, to boost the development of agriculture, Chinese government must make capital, labor and technology re-entered the agricultural field.