Technology Diffusion, Government Policy and Agricultural Sustainable Development

Abstract

With the increasing concern about the environment and human health, questions are already being asked about what role the government should play in sustainable development - to what extent environmental-friendly technologies help in the process of achieving agricultural sustainable development? Can governments speed the diffusion of technology by offering complementary services? There exist a number of alternative methods that are not so harmful for the environment and human health, for example, integrated pest management (IPM). However, there are many obstacles for the diffusion of sustainable technologies so that the adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies lags far behind technology innovation. After reviewing the commonly used models in agricultural technology adoption, the following model is used in this paper: adopt <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sub> = + f(R <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sub> , H <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sub> , T <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sub> , S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sub> , O <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sub> ) + e <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sub> in which, the dependent variable indicates whether the farmer I adopt the technology, while the independent variables represents the ith farmers' resource characteristics, household characteristics, technology characteristics, institution characteristics and others. After estimation of the adoption model and test of the hypothesis, some conclusions are made and some policy implications are proposed. The main conclusions are: (1) farmers use different strategies when facing environment and human health. (2) There are various factors that affect farmers' adoption of IPM, the adoption process is very complicated. (3) It is important to recognize the factors that affect farmers' awareness and mastery of IPM technologies. (4) Career of technology decision-maker significantly affects adoption of IPM technology. (5) Endowment of farmers especially production scale is significantly affecting the adoption of IPM. In addition, farmers' orientation to agriculture is another important factor. Accordingly, at least the following policy implications could be proposed: (1) farmers have willingness-to-pay for the environment and human health (especially the latter), so economic instruments (such as taxes) could be taken to encourage the adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies. (2) The government should recognize the characteristics of the early-adopters of sustainable agricultural technologies. (3) Markets should be created to increase the demand for organic products. (4) Farmers should be encouraged to do part-time jobs so that household land scale may be increased, and the increased scale will encourage the adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies.