For the sustainable development of human beings and society, it is important to conserve the ecosystems and alleviate poverty in the low agricultural productivity or ecologically vulnerable areas. To avoid the decrease in ecosystem services (ES) under the effects associated with reducing poverty, we need to carefully consider the relationship between land use changes and the economic development in economically poor areas. We selected the Lingqiu County as our study area, which is a national impoverished county in China, and analyzed the impact of poverty alleviation efforts on the ecological and economic sustainability in the region through ES evaluation. The results showed that land use change in the Lingqiu County has not changed the ES significantly during 2007-2016. The gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate (15.81%) during 2001-2016, indicates the effectiveness of the poverty alleviation efforts implemented. The rise in the index of ecological and economic relationship during 2001-2016 (from 0.2389 to 0.3629) maintains in a harmonious coordination situation. Presently, the value of ES has not been converted to market-based benefits, and therefore, it is indispensable to find a marketplace for ES (in an innovative way) to promote the high-quality sustainable development of a local economy.

The agricultural sustainable development for human well-being considers food security and ecological health as well as people’s socio-economic conditions. Nowadays, most of the holistic assessments of agricultural sustainability, mainly focus on food production and ecological consequences, relatively lacking analysis from the socio-economic perspective. In this context, this study constructs an agricultural social life cycle assessment model based on the guidelines of UNEP to assess the social and economic impacts on the three major staple grain crops in China, including maize, rice and wheat. The assessment model aims to analyze effects of stakeholders containing farmer, agricultural value chain actors, consumer, rural areas, society, and impact categories including high-quality growth of agriculture, a comfortable life in rural areas, the prosperity of rural people. The data is mainly from national statistical databases and representative industry databases. The impact assessment adopts social risk and social impact as quantitative characterization methods, and Analytical Hierarchical Process to obtain weights. The results show that: among the three major grain crops, farmers are the most important factors for stakeholders, and agricultural industrial development has the greatest potential negative impacts on society; maize has the most positive impacts on agricultural sustainable development in China.