Does agricultural cooperative membership help reduce the overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides? Evidence from rural China.

Tongshan Liu,Gang Wu

doi:10.1007/s11356-021-16277-0

Abstract

The overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (CFPs) has negatively impacted the environment and human health. It is an urgent issue that should be addressed. In this study, we investigate whether agricultural cooperatives can serve as an institutional arrangement that helps reduce the consumption of CFPs, using the data of 2012 family farms from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China. Various approaches, including instrumental variable-based two-stage residual inclusion approach (2SRI), endogenous switching probit (ESP) model, and endogenous switching regression (ESR) model, are utilized to help address the endogeneity issues of the cooperative membership variable. The results show that agricultural cooperative membership significantly increases the probability of reducing fertilizers and pesticides of the family farms and improves net return per yuan CFPs. The further analysis shows that agricultural cooperative production services reduced the usage of fertilizers and pesticides, while cooperatives marketing services only significantly lowered the use of pesticides. Our findings highlight the importance of promoting the development of agricultural cooperatives to support green agricultural production in China.

Highlights

The overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (CFPs) needs immediate, practical solutions in China to ensure food safety and environmental sustainability
We investigate whether agricultural cooperatives can serve as an institutional arrangement that helps reduce the consumption of CFPs, using the data of 2012 family farms from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China
The results show that agricultural cooperative membership significantly increases the probability of reducing fertilizers and pesticides of the family farms and improves net return per yuan CFPs

Summary

Introduction

The overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (CFPs) needs immediate, practical solutions in China to ensure food safety and environmental sustainability. Many agricultural cooperatives provide comprehensive services such as input purchase, production training, technique consultation, and field services to help farmer members follow those required standards. These agricultural cooperatives play critical roles in controlling the use of CFPs to ensure agricultural products’ safety. Effective communication between agricultural cooperative and members, trust in the agricultural cooperatives’ management team, and the collective organization objectives all are critical for the farmers to practice good agricultural practices (GAP) and follow the CFPs use standards of the agricultural cooperative (Liu et al 2019; Zhou et al 2016; Zhou and Jin 2009).

Analytical framework and hypotheses

Production perspective

Marketing perspective

Econometric model

Data source and variable description

Empirical results and discussions

Impact of cooperative membership

Mechanism analysis

Findings

Conclusions and policy implications