Analysis of the relationship between food production, water resources and power consumption in North China

North China is the major part in China's Huang-Huai-Hai grain production region, takes great responsibility to the collaborative development of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province. As the major driving factors of social and economic development, water resources and power play an important with the promotion and restriction between water and power consumption. In view of the shortage of water resources and severe overexploitation of groundwater in North China, the article selected the North China Plain, a concentration zone of the Huang-huai-Hai major grain production region, analyzed the relationship between grain production and the consumption of water and power through statistics data. The results show that the development of the irrigation agriculture greatly promoted the increasing of the grain production in the study area; and the groundwater is still dominant water resources in the farmland irrigation although there are the decreasing trend of the total water utilization amount and consumption structure of the increase of surface water consumption. And, the exponential relationships are obvious between groundwater consumption and the food output, as well as between groundwater consumption and power consumption in irrigation and drainage production process. The mutual relationship of the three has indicated that the exploitation of ground water within the region has greatly promoted food productivity and further increased power consumption. Therefore, it has been suggested to strictly restrain the exploitation of groundwater through power control under the premise of guaranteeing food safety by integrating the mutual relationship among food, water resources, and power consumption, which is not only conductive to improving the utilization efficiency of water resources and mitigating groundwater overexploitation, but also important for reducing regional power consumption. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.