Socioeconomic Determinants of Crop Diversity and Its Effect on Farmer Income in Guangxi, Southern China

Cheng Li,Eben Goodale,Myung-Bok Lee,Aiwu Jiang,Xinjian Chen,Christos Mammides

doi:10.3390/agriculture11040336

Abstract

Encouraging crop diversity could be a “win–win” for farmers and biodiversity conservation, if having a variety of crops produces the heterogeneity that supports biodiversity, and if multiple crops decrease the risk of farmers to losses due to pests, climatic events or market fluctuations, without strongly reducing their incomes. However, data on the factors that influence the decision to plant multiple crops, and how that affects profit, are needed, especially for East Asia, where these questions have been little studied. We distributed a questionnaire on these issues to 301 farmers in 35 villages in an agricultural area close to the city of Nanning in Guangxi, south China. Crop diversity increased with land size and closeness to the city. We detected no relationship between profit variability and crop diversity, but farmers with greater crop diversity and more land were more profitable, a result driven by several rarely planted but lucrative types of crops. Crop diversity can be a focus for policy to improve farmers’ livelihoods; these policies need to encourage farmers with little land to form cooperatives. Further research is needed to understand the effect of crop diversity on profit variability, and in areas closer to protected areas where biodiversity is higher.

Highlights

As the world population increases towards 9 billion people, there is an urgent need to expand agricultural production [1]
This study addresses a lack of knowledge about what factors influence crop diversity in East Asia, and in southern China, and about the economic consequences of planting more crops for farmers in this region
We show that crop diversity is profitable in the same region where other studies have shown that crop heterogeneity is associated with increased biodiversity [45,46]

Summary

Introduction

As the world population increases towards 9 billion people, there is an urgent need to expand agricultural production [1]. In the past 50 years, agricultural intensification has greatly increased yields; it has exasperated habitat loss and produced pollution from fertilizers and pesticides, threatening natural biodiversity [2,3,4] Such biodiversity is useful for farmers, because of the ecological services they provide such as pollination and pest control [5,6,7]. If spatial and temporal heterogeneity itself underlies biodiversity [11], crop diversification might be a way to improve biodiversity [10,12] This crop diversity could come through crop heterogeneity (adjacent crop fields of different types), polyculture, intercropping, or having multiple crops over time through crop rotation [13,14,15]. This has led to calls for diversified, small-scale agriculture to be a part of a “land-sharing” paradigm, in which biodiversity is retained in agricultural landscapes [16,17]

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Conclusion