Socioeconomic Determinants of Crop Diversity and Its Effect on Farmer Income in Guangxi, Southern China

Abstract

Encouraging crop diversity could be a “win–win” for farmers and biodiversity conservation, if having a variety of crops produces the heterogeneity that supports biodiversity, and if multiple crops decrease the risk of farmers to losses due to pests, climatic events or market fluctuations, without strongly reducing their incomes. However, data on the factors that influence the decision to plant multiple crops, and how that affects profit, are needed, especially for East Asia, where these questions have been little studied. We distributed a questionnaire on these issues to 301 farmers in 35 villages in an agricultural area close to the city of Nanning in Guangxi, south China. Crop diversity increased with land size and closeness to the city. We detected no relationship between profit variability and crop diversity, but farmers with greater crop diversity and more land were more profitable, a result driven by several rarely planted but lucrative types of crops. Crop diversity can be a focus for policy to improve farmers’ livelihoods; these policies need to encourage farmers with little land to form cooperatives. Further research is needed to understand the effect of crop diversity on profit variability, and in areas closer to protected areas where biodiversity is higher.

Crop heterogeneity is positively associated with beneficial insect diversity in subtropical farmlands

“…Previous studies have found positive relationships between diversity of dung beetles, pollinators and dragonflies and the services of decomposition, pollination and pest control (Noriega et al., 2018 and references cited within). Furthermore, we have recently shown that farmers that plant more crops are more profitable in this region (Li et al., 2021). Therefore, policymakers should encourage crop heterogeneity, as means to increase both biodiversity and farmer livelihoods.…”

“…Our study region is influenced by a subtropical monsoon climate, with a long hot summer, warm and wet spring, and humid and cool winter without frost. In this region, the mean field size was 0.048 ± 0.022 ( SD ) ha ( n = 52 sites) and the area of planted land per year per farmer was 0.36 ± 0.15 ha, including plantings in different seasons (Li et al., 2021).…”

Determinant Factor of Plant Species Diversity in the Organic Agriculture-Dominated System of Gedeo Zone, Southern Ethiopia

“…Utilization of the products is one of ecological and socioeconomic factors that influence the species diversity in the agricultural system [55][56][57]. e plant species were stated by the households as sources of primarily food, forage, enhancing soil fertility, construction materials, fuelwood, medicine, and other products of the commercial value (Figure 4(a)).…”

“…As shown in Figure 4(b), out of all plant species recorded, 87 species were mentioned as having one use type, 86 species having two use types, 38 species with three use types, and 10 species with four use types. Among all species, enset has multiple uses including staple food, soil fertility, construction materials (rope and house roof), and forage medicine [18,55]. HHs in western Ethiopia mentioned that most of the woody and herbaceous perennial species were used for more than one purpose [58].…”

Produce or Buy: Impacts of Citrus Farming and Crop Diversification on Household Dietary Diversity in Guangxi, China

“…Thus, cultivating fruit trees on their own can significantly boost their daily fruit intake [12]. The cultivation of high-profit economic crops like horticultural fruits not only increases farmers' income [13,14] but also enhances their financial capacity for staple crop cultivation [15]. Consequently, this contributes to elevating their food and nutrition security levels, facilitating broader food purchases from the market [16,17].…”