Abstract
Exploring and analyzing the common demands and behavioral responses of different stakeholders is important for revealing the mediating mechanisms of ecosystem service (ES) and realizing the management and sustainable supply of ES. This study took Mizhi County, a poverty-stricken area on the Loess Plateau in China, as an example. First, the main stakeholders, common demands, and behavioral responses in the food provision services were identified. Second, the relationship among stakeholders was analyzed. Finally, this study summarized three types of mediating mechanisms of food provision services and analyzed the influence of the different types of mediating mechanisms. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Five main stakeholders in the study area were identified: government, farmers, enterprises, cooperatives, and middlemen. (2) Increasing farmers’ income is the common demand of most stakeholders in the study area, and this common demand has different effects on the behavioral responses of different stakeholders. (3) There are three types of mediating mechanisms in the study area: government + farmers mediating corn and mutton, government + enterprises mediating millet, and government + cooperatives mediating apples. On this basis, the effects of the different types of mediating mechanisms on variations in food yield, and trade-offs and synergies in typical townships, were analyzed.
Highlights
Humans are constantly changing ecosystems to obtain more ecosystem services [1,2] and production materials [3,4,5]; among these outputs, food provision services support human survival and reproduction [6,7], and provide basic material conditions for social and economic development [8,9,10]
Using the stakeholder assessment index, we identified five main stakeholders: government, farmers, enterprises, cooperatives, and middlemen, and excluded other stakeholders, such as the public, media, research structures, and investment institutions (Figure 3)
The overall scores of middlemen were not high, but they scored 3 points in importance, influence, and means; middlemen were classified as the main stakeholders
Summary
Humans are constantly changing ecosystems to obtain more ecosystem services [1,2] and production materials [3,4,5]; among these outputs, food provision services support human survival and reproduction [6,7], and provide basic material conditions for social and economic development [8,9,10]. As a result of the growth in the economy and population, the unreasonable use of agricultural resources, and other factors, food safety problems have become increasingly prominent [14,15,16], and changes and instability in the food structure caused by the behavior of stakeholders are becoming increasingly serious [17,18,19], especially in poor areas [20]. Taking poor areas as an example, it is urgent to analyze the mediating mechanisms of stakeholders on food provision services. Some scholars have analyzed the sustainability of food provision services [21,22], food provision models [23], food supply safety [24,25], and changes in the food production space [26] from the perspective of stakeholders.
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