A Worldwide Comparison of Water Use Efficiency of Crop Production

Worldwide food security and water safety issues necessitate countries with low water use efficiency of crop production (CWUE) to increase it and reduce regional CWUE variations. CWUE function was estimated with stochastic frontier analysis, and CWUE variation was decomposed on inter-continental, intra-continental and international level with variance decomposition method. It is proposed that in order to efficiently improve the CWUE and reduce regional CWUE variation, countries with low CWUE should focus more on the factors listed from the decomposition. Scenario analysis proved the effect of improving the most important factor of CWUE variation, and showed some new key factors in the future after we realize the improvement as mentioned in the scenarios. Lastly we put forward some specific suggestions on the way to improve the CWUE.