Conflicting stakeholder priorities produce sustainability tradeoffs for cereal production in Northeast China

Abstract Northeast China (NEC) as one of the primary breadbaskets of China plays an essential role in achieving sustainable agriculture to provide sufficient and nutritious food while minimizing resource consumption and environmental costs. Growing evidence indicates crop switching is a promising solution for achieving sustainable agriculture. Comprehensively assessing synergies and tradeoffs among competing objectives for stakeholders is essential for crop switching implementation but not well documented in NEC. We examine tradeoffs and synergies among multi-objectives—nutritional yields, water demand, greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), and benefits—from policymakers’ and farmers’ perspectives for cereals in NEC using the most recent data available, and assess potential sustainability changes from implementing the policy of crop switching. We find no single cereal can achieve all objectives of sustainable agriculture in most regions of NEC for stakeholders and synergies and tradeoffs have obviously spatial heterogeneity. Overall, rice has the best performance on energy and protein yield but the worst on iron yield, water requirement, and GHGs. Coarse cereals (sorghum and millet) have better desirable attributes on iron yield 223% and 66% more, blue water requirement 91% and 90% less, and GHGs 84% less than rice, but not for energy and protein yield because of lower yields. From the farmers’ perspective, rice can produce more revenue than dryland cereals by 32%–58% due to higher price and yield. Nevertheless, the sustainability of cereal production in NEC will be improved from crop switching with a 33% increment in iron production, a 24% and 3% decrease in irrigation water demand and GHGs, and a 4% increment in farmers’ revenue on existing cultivation area without compromises in rice production. Our study indicates that comprehensively assessing the synergies and tradeoffs among multiple objectives and stakeholders will provide more opportunities to align policymakers with practitioners to make crop switching feasible and achieve sustainable agriculture.