Abstract
Cultivated land is closely related to national food security, rural economic development and social stability. The cultivated land pollution and carbon emissions caused by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, film residues, etc., in the process of cultivated land utilization pose a serious threat to the cultivated land ecosystem in China. The comprehensive analysis on the cultivated land green utilization efficiency (GUECL), its influencing factors, and optimization direction provides a valuable basis for the green utilization of cultivated land. Based on a panel data of 30 provinces (cities or districts) in China from 2001 to 2016, the GUECL in China under the constraints of pollution and carbon emissions was measured by using a super-efficient SBM-VRS (slack based model-variable return to scale) model. The influencing factors and optimization directions of the GUECL were analyzed through the Tobit model and slack values, respectively. The results show that the GUECL in China rose with fluctuations from 2001 to 2016. Since 2014, the eastern region has surpassed the western region and has become the region with the highest mean GUECL value. The room for resource conservation and pollution reduction varies in different regions of China. Farmers’ dependence on cultivated land and agricultural added value are positively related to the GUECL in China. Farmers’ occupational differentiation, agricultural machinery density, and agricultural disaster rate have had negative effects on the GUECL in China. The loss of the GUECL in China is mainly due to the redundancies of land input, pollution emission, and mechanical input. By analyzing these influencing factors and optimization directions, it is concluded that improving rural land transfer market and agricultural infrastructure construction, establishing a new agricultural technology extension system, and vigorously cultivating new professional farmers are the targeted measures to improve the GUECL.
Highlights
Cultivated land is the uppermost agricultural productive material
This paper comprehensively evaluated the green utilization efficiency of cultivated land (GUECL) under the constraints of pollution and carbon emissions, aiming to solve the following problems: (1) What is the GUECL in China? What characteristics of temporal and spatial differentiation does it present?
Agricultural machinery density is significantly, negative related to the GUECL. The reason for this might be that the negative effect of agricultural mechanization on the GUECL is greater than the positive effect
Summary
Cultivated land is the uppermost agricultural productive material. In the period of 2004–2015, China achieved “twelve consecutive increases” in grain production, with an average annual growth rate of 2.8%. According to the Chinese Environmental Status Bulletin 2015, top-grade cultivated land area in China only accounted for 2.9% of the country’s total appraised cultivated land area in 2014; high-grade, medium-grade, and low-grade cultivated land accounted for 26.5%, 52.9%, and 17.7%, respectively. Under the tightening constraints of cultivated land resources and environmental carrying capacity, the assessment of the cultivated land green utilization efficiency (GUECL) contributes to coordinate the relationship between cultivated land production and the ecological environment; it is of great significance for agricultural sustainable development and national food security. In the assessment of the GUECL, the ignorance of the negative impacts of pesticides, fertilizers and carbon emissions on the ecological environment inevitably result in an imperfect land utilization efficiency index system and a distorted reflection of the actual situation Along these lines, this paper comprehensively evaluated the GUECL under the constraints of pollution and carbon emissions, aiming to solve the following problems:. (3) In terms of the input and output of cultivated land utilization, from what directions can we optimize the green utilization efficiency of cultivated land in China?
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