Cultivated Land Changes and Agricultural Potential Productivity in Mainland China

Dingxiang Zhang,Hongyan Cai,Linlin Xiao,Xiaohuan Yang

doi:10.3390/su70911893

Abstract

With rapid and continuous population growth and the associated declining quality of cultivated land, food security in China has been attracting the attention of scholars both domestically and internationally. In recent decades, the implications of the cultivated land balance policy have promoted spatial changes of cultivated land. Estimating the agricultural potential productivity and assessing its response to cultivated land changes could provide a scientific basis for strategic decision-making concerning grain production and thus guarantee food security. In the present study, the Agro-Ecological Zone (AEZ) model was applied to estimate the agricultural potential productivity. Data from the second national land survey were first applied to characterize the changes of cultivated land (by comparing the cultivated land in 2009 with that in 2012) and their influence on potential productivity in Mainland China. We propose a utilization degree of total potential productivity (UTP) and its ratio coefficient (RUTP) to reveal the utilization status of potential productivity and its change characteristics at the provincial level. It was found that there was a trend for cultivated land to be shifted away from cities, and the average productive capability per hectare of cultivated land declined from 7386.5 kg/ha to 6955.2 kg/ha by occupying highly productive cultivated land generally near the cities and compensating less productive cultivated land in remote areas. UTPs and RUTPs indicate a significant difference in the utilization status of potential productivity among the 31 provinces of Mainland China. Grain production with the aim of sustainable development should be strategized according to the particular facts of each province. The methods we applied can mine the impacts of cultivated land changes on potential productivity and the utilization of potential productivity effectively.

Highlights

Explosive urban growth in China has converted cultivated land at the urban-rural divide to non-agricultural uses at enormous rates [1,2], in the southeast coastal areas of China, which have experienced the most rapid economic growth in the nation [3,4]
Three questions were addressed: (i) What are the characteristics of change in cultivated land in China? (ii) How large a development space does grain yield have? (iii) What are the characteristics of the change in the utilization degree of potential productivity? The results provide important information for macroscopic decision-making in terms of cultivated land application
Agricultural potential productivity was developed at a pixel level for the years of 2009 and 2012 in Mainland China

Summary

Introduction

Explosive urban growth in China has converted cultivated land at the urban-rural divide to non-agricultural uses at enormous rates [1,2], in the southeast coastal areas of China, which have experienced the most rapid economic growth in the nation [3,4]. To mitigate the pressure of cultivated land loss, the government has implemented numerous farmland protection programmes, with various degrees of success. The most important one is the cultivated land balance policy, implemented in 1997, which stipulates that any area taken out of cultivation must be offset by putting at least an equal area into cultivation [5,6]. There has hardly been a significant change in the total area of cultivated land in recent decades. According to the Ministry of Land and Resources of China, total cultivated land in Mainland.

Methods

Results

Conclusion