How to solve the dilemma of China’s land fallow policy: Application of voluntary bidding mode in the Yangtze River Delta of China

Abstract

Long-term intensive use of arable land has caused soil quality degradation and threatened the sustainable development of agriculture. Faced with these challenges, numerous countries and regions have adopted fallow policies with different modes of implementation. Among these places, China has adopted a fallow policy, which is compulsory and has the same compensation standard. This policy has subsequently resulted in new problems, such as farmers’ dissatisfaction and financial pressure of the government. Hence, a question on this matter emerges: At present, should China abandon the compulsory mode and adopt a voluntary bidding mode for farmers? We conducted an experiment on 714 farmers in the core area of the Yangtze River Delta region. For the following fallow project, farmers would apply independently according to their willingness and arable land conditions and provide the lowest compensation standard they were willing to accept. The contingent valuation method (CVM) and the Heckman two-stage model were applied in this study. The results showed that (1) the proportion of farmers willing to participate in voluntary bidding mode was as high as 72.83 %, while only 50.84 % opted to participate in the original mode. (2) In addition, the voluntary bidding mode performed better than the original mode in terms of both the scale of fallow land and the compensation expenditure of the government. The regression results showed that (3) women were more likely to participate in the voluntary bidding mode, while farmers with higher agricultural output were more likely not to participate in the original mode. At the same time, farmers with larger arable land and higher agricultural output significantly increased their compensation requirements. We propose that voluntary bidding mode should be piloted in some economically developed areas, and various types of fallow modes should be set according to the willingness of farmers, the scale of arable land, and agricultural output. And public awareness of the dangers of soil degradation and the significance of fallow, as well as the training of farmers in non-agricultural employment skills, must be strengthened. Moreover, the fallow supervision mechanism needs to be improved.