Abstract
The behavior of farming households is the most direct factor involved in the transition of cultivated land utilization from high-input/high-output to green and sustainable utilization mode. Improving farming households’ green utilization efficiency of cultivated land (GUECL) is of great significance in facilitating agricultural green development in China. However, there are few studies on GUECL based on the micro-perspective of farming households that cover the comprehensive benefits to the economy, ecology, and society. This paper builds a theoretical analysis framework of farming households’ green utilization of cultivated land and uses the super-efficiency EBM model and a questionnaire to conduct an empirical analysis of 952 farming households in Shandong Province to evaluate the green utilization efficiency of cultivated land. The results show that the GUECL of the farming households is generally not high, with an average value of 0.67, and can be further improved. The higher the GUECL, the lower the input and undesired output per unit yield and per unit output value. Tobit regression results show that a farming household’s per capita income is significantly positively correlated with the GUECL, while agricultural insurance, agricultural subsidies, cultivated land scale, cultivated land fragmentation, and regional economic level are significantly negatively correlated with the GUECL. In addition, recommendations can be made on promoting and innovating agricultural green development technology, popularizing and publicizing farming households’ thoughts on the green utilization of cultivated land, and ensuring and improving rural green life so as to provide a reference for promoting green transition of cultivated land utilization with diversified coordination and multiple measures.
Highlights
As the world’s population is increasing and real problems, such as climate change and scarcity of natural resources, are emerging, food security is becoming an increasingly important global issue [1]
This paper applied MaxDEA software to calculate the green utilization efficiency of cultivated land (GUECL) based on the survey data of farming households
To observe the distribution characteristics and laws of efficiency of the calculated results more clearly, according to the level of GUECL of sample farming households, the measured GUECL of 952 farming households was divided into three levels: >=0 and =0.5 and 1, high-GUECL group (Table 2)
Summary
As the world’s population is increasing and real problems, such as climate change and scarcity of natural resources, are emerging, food security is becoming an increasingly important global issue [1]. After the outbreak of COVID-19, countries are aware of the urgent need to enhance food security [2]. Producing more food to feed the growing global population will require more cultivated land resources [3]. Effective cultivated land utilization is the key factor affecting regional sustainable development and food security [5]. Due to limited cultivated land resources and severe food security challenges, human beings can no longer rely on the traditional cultivated land utilization mode of disorderly increase in input and must adopt more creative and technologically advanced methods to minimize the consumption of natural resources. Green transition of cultivated land utilization needs urgent attention
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