The article aims to provide an overview of China's agricultural development and its sustainability by focusing on the agriculture-environmental nexus. We first review literature regarding trends in agricultural development and driving forces. China has made impressive progress at providing food for 22% of the world's population. At the same time, severe environmental impacts have been incurred which not only affect future food security but also have impacts on other socioeconomic aspects. The agricultural policies that have been put into practice have direct or indirect impacts on such environmental outcomes. We review the impacts of agricultural policies as well as conservation policies, their effectiveness, some unintended consequences and conflicts. The article concludes that technology and institutional innovation in China should emphasize more integrated sustainable development considering the agriculture-environment nexus, instead of setting incoherent and sometimes incompatible policy goals for each separate side.

This article develops an analytic framework to analyze the tradeoff between economic efficiency and distributional equity in targeting payments for ecosystem services (PES). It also proposes an empirical procedure to trace out the efficiency‐equity frontier, where the program is Pareto optimal in the sense that it cannot be improved upon to achieve either higher efficiency or distributional equity without compromising the other. We apply the procedure to the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the largest PES program in U.S. history, to analyze (a) whether it is possible to improve both the efficiency and the distributional equity of the program, and (b) what the choice made by CRP administrators implies about the political‐economic balance. Results reveal that (a) CRP administrators forfeited about 9% of efficiency for an 18%–23% improvement in distributional equity, depending on the equity indicator used, in the eighteenth signup of the CRP; (b) reducing the maximum allowable rental rate for all contracts would improve efficiency at the cost of distributional equity; (c) reducing the maximum county enrollment cap would reduce efficiency without generating much improvement in distributional equity; and (d) the CRP targeting criterion could be redesigned to achieve both higher efficiency and higher distributional equity.

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Organisation de Coopération et de Développement Économiques Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 13-Dec-2016 ___________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________ English-Or. English ENVIRONMENT DIRECTORATE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF OPEN SPACE IN U.S. URBAN AREAS-ENVIRONMENT WORKING PAPER No. 112 By JunJie Wu (1), Walid Oueslati (2) and Jialing Yu (1) (1) Oregon State University, USA (2) OECD Environment Directorate OECD Working Papers should not be reported as representing the official views of the OECD or of its member countries. The opinions expressed and arguments employed are those of the author(s).