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. Feeding a growing population with global natural-resource constraintsbecomes an increasingly challenging task. Changing spatial cropping patternscould contribute to sustaining crop production and mitigating water scarcity.Previous studies on water saving through international food trade focussedeither on comparing water productivities among food-trading countries oron analysing food trade in relation to national water endowments. Here,we consider, for the first time, how both differences in national averagewater productivities and water endowments can be considered to analysecomparative advantages of countries for different types of crop production.A linear-optimization algorithm is used to find modifications in globalcropping patterns that reduce national blue water scarcity in the world'smost severely water-scarce countries, while keeping global production ofeach crop unchanged and preventing any increase in total irrigated orrainfed harvested areas in each country. The results are used to assessnational comparative advantages and disadvantages for different crops. Evenwhen allowing a maximum expansion of the irrigated or rainfed harvested area percrop per country of only 10 %, the blue water scarcity in the world's mostwater-scarce countries can be greatly reduced. In this case, we couldachieve a reduction of the global blue water footprint of crop production of21 % and a decrease of the global total harvested and irrigated areas of2 % and 10 % respectively. Shifts in rainfed areas have a dominantshare in reducing the blue water footprint of crop production.

Changing global cropping patterns to minimize national blue water scarcity