Does Fallowing Cultivated Land Threaten Food Security? Empirical Evidence from Chinese Pilot Provinces

Abstract

Facing worsening problems, including the decreasing amount, quality, and deterioration of land ecosystems, cultivated land needs protective measures. China has been conducting an experimental fallow policy to deter these problems in five pilot provinces since 2016. However, inadequate and inconclusive studies of the impacts of fallow policy on food security have motivated the authors to fill this knowledge gap and to provide evidence for policy-making. Using the modified cultivated land pressure model, this study explores the cultivated land pressure at three scales (nation, province, and prefecture) to determine the capacity of feeding people using cultivated land, and examines the impact of fallowing cultivated land. There are three main findings. First, the cultivated land pressure in China continually decreased during the period of 2000–2016, and would remain in a decreasing trend during 2017–2020 even if the measures implemented doubled the fallowing scale every year. Second, the spatial patterns of the cultivated land pressure between the provincial and prefectural scale show a similar overview, with some nuanced disparities. Finally, the five pilot provinces show various amplitudes of variation in cultivated land pressure, ranging from 0.017% to 9.027% under three fallow scale scenarios. Thus, the results of this research support the argument that fallow policy will not threaten food security at a national and provincial scale, based on the current fallow scale and enlargement pace. The deeper understanding of the impact of fallow policy provides a scientific reference for policymaking and calls for further studies focusing on a more comprehensive measurement of cultivated land pressure and optimization fallow scale.

China’s food security situation and key questions in the new era: A perspective of farmland protection

“…With the continuous improvement of cognitive ability, the food security problem no longer establishes a quantitative goal and standard but gradually becomes a process variable composed of trials, errors, intertwined administrative powers, and other uncertainties (Yang et al, 2019). Long-term food demand scenarios have become an important tool for studying food security and analyzing agricultural environment impacts to clarify such uncertain variables (Bodirsky et al, 2015).…”

“…Usually, the range between the high-expectation and low-expectation worlds in different scenarios jointly determines the simulation results uncertainty (Verburg et al, 2013b). Therefore, exploring the resilience space for farmland resource optimization under uncertain conditions based on the bottom line of food security can reduce future farmland management risks and improve policy effectiveness (Yang et al, 2019).…”

The Impacts of Farmland Loss on Regional Food Self-Sufficiency in Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration over Last Two Decades

“…But, measures should be taken to ensure the quantity and the quality of farmland since it is the core resource ensuring food security [56]. These measures may include implementing strict policy for the requisition-compensation balance of arable land [57,58], reasonably developing saline land, tidal flat and some unutilized land to supplement the farmland [59,60] and applying the fallowing and crop rotation system [61,62] to improve the quality of farmland.…”

Analysis of the spatial differentiation and driving force of arable land abandonment and non-grain in the hilly mountainous areas of Gannan

“…At the same time, scholars mostly use Tobit model [ 19 ], probit model [ 20 ], random forest model [ 21 ], spatial error model [ 22 ], multiple linear regression method [ 23 ], logistic regression [ 24 ] and other ways to explore the influencing factors of two kinds of arable land phenomena. From the perspective of research scale, the problems of arable land abandonment and non-grain have been involved at the provincial scale [ 25 ] and city and county scales [ 26 ]. Most of the existing studies have focused on the administrative unit scale, and most of them are macro studies and qualitative studies.…”