Growing global food demand, climate change, and climate policies favoring bioenergy production are expected to increase pressures on water resources around the world. Many analysts predict that water shortages will constrain the ability of farmers to expand irrigated cropland, which would be critical to ramping up production of both food and bioenergy crops. If true, bioenergy production and food consumption would decline amid rising food prices and pressures to convert forests to rain-fed farmland. Now a team of researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change has put this prediction to the test.