Wildlife damage and cultivated land abandonment: Findings from the mountainous areas of Chongqing, China

Land fragmentation and the small size of land parcels are still the major bottlenecks for agriculture sustainable development in rural China, and an efficient land rental market could consolidate land plots and realize agricultural management at a moderate scale. However, transaction cost is still the main obstacle of land transfer. It is, therefore, essential to reduce the excessive transaction costs in the process of transfer; the primary task is to identify the roots of transaction costs. In order to accurately identify the sources of transaction costs, a generalized ordered Logit model with thresholds that allowed transaction costs to affect different directions of land transfer was developed using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey in 2015. The results suggested that the roots of transaction costs presented significant differences regarding the supply and demand of cropland. For the supply of land, the land titling program, land transfer intermediaries, and well-planned roads were the three most important factors that reduced transaction costs. For the demand of land, the three critical measures for reducing the transaction costs were well-planned roads, land consolidation, and the land titling program. The government should continue to push forward the land titling program and land consolidation projects in rural China, especially in hilly and mountainous areas. The infrastructure that greatly restricted agricultural development should be improved at a moderate level and the system of land circulating intermediary services at the township level should be established.

Section: Improvement Of the Tenure Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

What Affects Participation in the Farmland Rental Market in Rural China? Evidence from CHARLS

Wang

2019

“…With cultivated land abandonment in China, scholars have studied the pattern and driving factors from the micro-level of peasant households, parcels, and villages, mainly with the aim to understand perennial abandonment [8,24,25,27,42]. However, our understanding of seasonal abandonment is still insufficient.…”

Section: Conclusion and Policy Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the determinants of China's arable land abandonment have already been investigated by some scholars, almost all of these case studies concerned perennial abandonment and focused on the micro level (including households, villages, and land parcels) [8,24,25,27,42]. In addition, recent studies often focused on abandonment in mountainous areas, but little attention has been paid to the plains of China.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Factors Driving Seasonal Farmland Abandonment: A Case Study at the Regional Level in Hunan Province, Central China

Liu

Zhang

et al. 2017

Farmland abandonment, including perennial and seasonal abandonment, is an important process of land use change that matters most to food security. Although there is a great deal of studies on farmland abandonment, seasonal abandonment, which is as serious as perennial abandonment, has attracted little academic attention. This paper takes Hunan Province in central China as its study area and uses a spatial regression model to examine the driving factors of seasonal farmland abandonment at the county level. Our results show that farmland abandonment has striking spatial relativity, and there are two clustering zones with a high index of farmland abandonment (IFA) in the Dongting plain and the basin in south-central Hunan, while a clustering zone of low IFA can be found in the mountains of southwest Hunan. Farmland abandonment at the regional level is negatively affected by the land productive potentialities, proportion of mechanized planting, ratio of effective irrigation, and distance to provincial capital, while it is positively associated with the variables mountainous terrain, per capita farmland area, and labor shortage. Additionally, farmland abandonment is also affected by adjacent areas through its spatial dependence. In short, seasonal farmland abandonment is also driven integratedly by the socioeconomic and environmental dimensions and spatial interaction of farm abandonment.

“…However, studies on the spatiotemporal change analysis of a certain land area, such as sloping farmland, are sparse. Some studies have been conducted on the change of cultivated land [33][34][35]. However, the changes of sloping farmland still need further discussion.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatiotemporal Changes and the Driving Forces of Sloping Farmland Areas in the Sichuan Region

Xiao

Zhang

et al. 2019

Sloping farmland is an essential type of the farmland resource in China. In the Sichuan province, livelihood security and social development are particularly sensitive to changes in the sloping farmland, due to the region's large portion of hilly territory and its over-dense population. In this study, we focused on spatiotemporal change of the sloping farmland and its driving forces in the Sichuan province. Sloping farmland areas were extracted from geographic data from digital elevation model (DEM) and land use maps, and the driving forces of the spatiotemporal change were analyzed using a principal component analysis (PCA). The results indicated that, from 2000 to 2015, sloping farmland decreased by 3263 km 2 in the Sichuan province. The area of gently sloping farmland (<10 • ) decreased dramatically by 1467 km 2 , especially in the capital city, Chengdu, and its surrounding areas. However, the steep sloping farmland (>25 • ) decreased by 302 km 2 , and was still the largest portion of total farmland in the area. The PCA analysis indicated that the main driving forces behind the changes were social and economic factors. The influence of agricultural intensification factors, such as the multiple cropping index and sown areas of crops, was relatively weak. Given the decrease in the overall slope cultivated area and the increased portion of moderately steep slope land (10-25 • ) in the cultivated area, special attention should be paid to the scientific conservation of sloping farmland during rapid social and economic development.Sustainability 2019, 11, 906 2 of 16 has significantly decreased because of degradation and the conversion of farmland into building land [17,18], where the increasing speeds of construction and forest land are faster than other land use types [19].Slope cropland is an ecosystem involving the interaction of both natural and social factors [20][21][22]. The evolution of the sloping farmland system has not only been influenced by natural conditions, but also by social and economic factors [23,24]. The decrease in human-induced cultivated land has become a serious problem, particularly with the increasing global population growth and the unreasonable utilization of water and soil resources by human beings [25][26][27][28]. Humans' social and economic activities have played a decisive role in changing cultivated land, where the impact of socio-economic and related industrial policies has been felt over a short period of time, including population growth, agricultural structure adjustment, urbanization, GDP per capita, output value, etc. [29,30]. Nowak and Scheifder found that sloping farmland was seriously affected by agricultural activities, and that the degradation areas were mainly located at the agriculturally intensive areas [31]. The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) have identified the main driving forces of land-use and land-cover, which are natural environments, land-use management, a...