Principal Investigators：Prof. Erwin Bulte, Development Economics Group, Wageningen University, The Netherlands; Prof. SHI Xiaoping, College of Public Administration, Nanjing Agricultural University, P.R. China
Project Partners：Nanjing Agricultural University, P.R. China; Wageningen University, the Netherlands; the Institute of Genetic and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.R. China; China Agricultural University, P.R. China; Tsinghua University, P.R. China; Renmin University, P. R. China; Zhejiang University, P.R. China
Funding Received：8.119 Million RMB and 1.794 million Euro
Sponsored by：The Royal Netherland Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) of the Netherlands; Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of China.
Project Period：December, 2016 ─ December, 2020.12
Brief Introduction：
Governing natural resources for future food provision in an environmentally sound manner is an urgent demand by and also a severe challenge for China and for the world as a whole. The availability and quality of natural resources essential for food production, such as land and water, are under threat in many respects. Their sustainable management requires an integrated water-land-and-food-nexus approach that involves potential synergies and trade-offs. State-of-the-art knowledge about the institutions, policies and markets governing environmental pollution, natural resource utilization and food supply chains, as well as the underlying processes contributing to changes in land, water and food availability and quality, is of great necessity for successful adoption of the water-land-and-food-nexus approach.
This project aims to form a sustainable Strategic Alliance of leading Dutch and Chinese researchers carrying out interdisciplinary research on the land, water and food nexus in China, to obtain insights to formulate coherent recommendations for adequate and safe food provision based on sustainable resource management, and to develop innovative methodologies applicable to examining similar problems in the rest of the world. To realize these aims, the following six coherent sub-projects will be carried out by interdisciplinary teams of Chinese and Dutch researchers:
1. Farm scaleenlargement, efficiency gains and environmental spill-overs: to identify factors affecting consolidation of small and fragmented family farms, and to assess the efficiency of family farms in producing food and the environmental spill-over effects from agro-chemical use.
2. Modelling water pollution and water use in agriculture: to better understand the interactions between pollution and use of water as a resource for agriculture.
3. Manure management for diminishing environmental pollution and improving soil quality: to determine the bottlenecks in and possible options for improving manure management.
4. Designing effective institutional frameworks for supplying sufficient and safe food to all consumers: to determine which institutional framework contributes effectively to securing access to safe and sustainable food supply.
5. Impact assessment of land, water and manure management interventions: to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed interventions through randomized controlled trials.
6. Designing and assessment of integrated management interventions in food systems: to develop scenarios for integrated management of natural resources for adequate and safe food supply by integrating the models and data from the existing sources and from the above sub-projects 1 - 4.
