Abstract
As with food production, waste management on semi-subsistent farms is a joint outcome of household-specific and farm-specific resources. It is useful therefore to analyze waste-disposal decisions with this jointness in mind. We do so here with a sample of Chinese farms. Attention is given to five distinct types of waste: packaging materials, manure, wastewater, plastic mulch, and straw. We find farm recycling to intensify as household cash income, farm manager’s age and education, and farm workforce size expand. Recycling declines however as the number of dependents and farm cultivable area enlarge. Put differently, waste management improves as the family’s labor and capital resources grow, but deteriorate if landholdings expand while capital and labor resources do not. The small family farm’s recycling behavior, in short, appears to be entirely rational. Specifically household and specifically farm factors are each important to the capital and labor mix that promotes recycling. In the aggregate, a one-percent variation in the principal household factors induces an average 0.35 percent change in recycling activity, while a one-percent variation in the principal farm factors induces an average 0.18 percent change. Assuming continued economic development, we find reason to be moderately optimistic about the future of small-farm waste disposal.
Highlights
As resource use in the world’s developing areas moves from traditional to modern, the volume, variety, and intensity of waste products rise in tandem
We find reason to be moderately optimistic about the future of small-farm waste disposal
The semi-subsistent household typically remains the fundamental unit of agricultural production and the principal waste disposal decision maker in these nations
Summary
As resource use in the world’s developing areas moves from traditional to modern, the volume, variety, and intensity of waste products rise in tandem. The survey questionnaire included: (a) the household farm’s agronomic characteristics such as plant species, soil type, and cultivation methods; (b) its practices potentially affecting pollution; (c) a demographic profile of the respondent’s farm family; (d) a depiction of local environmental conditions; (e) family and farm manager attitudes toward protecting the environment beyond the farm; (f) the household head’s agricultural technological training and assistance; and (g) proxies for the household’s farm objectives, such as its orientation toward market sales and the number of household members released to work in the city The survey employed both a questionnaire and semi-openinterview format and drew on a combination of stratified and random sampling. Of the 300 questionnaires distributed, 291 were enumerated and 283 screened as valid, providing a 94.3% postdistribution yield rate
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