Pinch Analysis for Land-Constrained Agriculture Sector Planning

Abstract Agriculture is an essential economic sector as it plays an important role in providing growing populations with sufficient food. Thus, it is imperative for policymakers to plan sufficient food stockpiles based on consumption requirements while ensuring lands are used in an efficient manner for producing a range of crops. Land is a limited resource and should be utilised efficiently to meet crop/food production demands. Thus, this work presents land use pinch analysis (LUPA), to aid planning of crop based on land footprint. LUPA is a novel application that allows the decision maker to determine the minimum amount of low land footprint crop required to achieve reductions in land usage and to meet food product demands. To illustrate LUPA, this work provides a numerical case study intended to highlight the benefits and features of the methodology. The case study aims to determine the amount of low land footprint oil crop (e.g., palm oil) that could replace other oil crops to meet a given edible oil demand and achieve reductions in land footprint. Results from the case study suggest that policymakers can opt for around 1 million hectares of low land footprint oil crop to meet the specified edible oil demand and replacing about 8 million hectares of a higher land footprint oil crop in the process. The case study is revisited analyse the impact of crop yield on the planning. This evidently shows that LUPA can be used as a means for strategising land allocation and land use reductions to meet edible oil demands.