| China is the most populous country in the world. As such, ensuring China's food security is essential to Chinese as well as global economic development and social stability. China's process of industrialization over the past 20 years has been accompanied by the shifting of water and land resources, the foundation of grain production, from agricultural to non-agricultural sectors, which has given rise to the big debate among countries all over the world as to whether China has sufficient water and land resources to ensure grain production, hi previous research on food security, the agricultural sector often neglected the necessity to balance with water resources while the water management sector usually failed to analyze the balance between food and water resources as they did not consider other economic conditions such as grain demand and trade.Therefore, this paper closely links grain demand with the demand for irrigation water and security of water resources. A new model, the CAPSIM-PODIUM model has been developed on the basis of the CAPSIM and PODIUM models. The CAPSIM model, originally developed by the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the first and most comprehensive model for Chinese food demand, supply and trade analysis at the national level. The PODIUM model, developed by the International Water Management Institute, is a tool for accounting of water resources at the basin level. CAPSDVI-PODIUM has been used as a tool in this paper for analyzing food security and water balance scenarios of China in 2020 based upon the database about food and water situation at the national level, provincial level, basin level and county level, hi accordance with such analysis, this paper puts forward policy recommendations for irrigation diversion of water, regional distribution of agriculture and food security.According to the projections of our research, with the growth of population and income in the coming two decades, Chinese grain demand (trade grain excluding soybeans) in 2020 will exceed that in 2000 by 25%. However, such growth will not lead to food insecurity in China. As far as investment in agricultural technology is reinforced, irrigation area is maintained at the current scale, and irrigation assurance ratio is upgraded, by 2020 China will achieve a grain self-sufficiency ratio of 91%. If we assume irrigation area will be expanded under government plan, grain self-sufficiency ratio will be even higher, reaching over 98% in 2020. China will be capable of assuring aggregate grain supply at the national level. However, from aregional perspective, due to different attributes of water and land resources, the shortage of irrigation water in northern China will lead to regional food insecurity. As such, the problem with China's food security is to a greater extent the problem of regional food insecurity.With the increase in industrial and domestic diversion of water, water scarcity in the Haihe, Huaihe and Yellow River basins are becoming more and more prominent. Several scenarios were formulated and analyzed in this study, The results show that, if irrigation-specific water use efficiency is not improved, water shortage in these basins will amount to 35-58 billion m3 in 2020, equivalent to the average annual amount of water resources in the Haihe Basin. It has been proved that regional agricultural restructuring has little impact on relaxing water scarcity in Northern China. As the Haihe, Huaihe and Yellow River basins have already achieved a fairly high level of irrigation basin efficiency, exclusive reliance on upgrading such efficiency is unlikely to achieve balance of irrigation water in these basins. Rather, the solution would be promote production structure changes among regions or implement inter-basin water transfer projects on the basis of upgrading the efficiency of utilizing irrigation water.Therefore, this paper puts forward the following recommendations:? Transform state food policy from only national food security orienta...
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