Land fragmentation, adoption intensity of climate-smart agricultural practices, and economic performance of banana farmers in China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Land fragmentation (LF) may influence farmers’ choices of agricultural practices to adapt to climate change in developing countries. Based on the primary data collected from 422 banana growers in China, this work first assesses the impact of LF on farmers’ adoption intensity of climate-smart agricultural practices (CSAPs) using the instrumental variables (IV) method, and explore the heterogeneous effects of adoption intensity of CSAPs and LF on farmers’ economic performance using the quantile regression (QR) method. The estimated results provide the first insight that LF is positively associated with farmers’ adoption intensity of CSAPs in agricultural production. China has a large population and less cultivated lands for each farmer household. Thus, farmers are inclined to use more CSAPs on these fragmented lands to sustain farm productivity and net profits under climatic shocks. Furthermore, we find that the adoption intensity of CSAPs significantly enhanced the economic performance of banana farms. Specifically, the higher intensity of CSAPs improved farmers’ banana income across the selected quantiles, while it increased net farm returns only for farmers with a high-level income. However, LF exerted a negative impact on farmers’ economic performance, and it is statistically significant for low-income farmers.