Agricultural production under rural tourism on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau: From the perspective of smallholder farmers

Abstract

Rural tourism has been the leading alternative livelihood of farmers on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in recent years. However, the trade-off between agricultural production and rural tourism has been gradually serious. Therefore, we selected the Zhagana Village, an example of rural tourism on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, to discuss the agricultural production under rural tourism from smallholder farmers' perspective, and analyze its existence severity of the trade-off. Based on the comparative analysis of smallholder farmers' agricultural production behavior (including the production scale, agricultural input, agricultural output, and production efficiency), we reviewed the agricultural production in the whole study region in 2005–2019. The results show a certain degree of trade-off between agricultural production and rural tourism on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. At the level of smallholder farmers, under the background of rural tourism development, agricultural production efficiency (mainly the production efficiency of grassland) has significantly increased due to the further expansion of the scale of livestock husbandry by smallholder farmers. At the regional level, with the development of rural tourism, the regional production structure has gradually changed from the integrated management of farming, forestry, and animal husbandry into the mode of taking animal husbandry as a dominant industry, farming and forestry as supplementary industries, but the regional agricultural productivity has not been stagnated or weakened.