Understanding cropland abandonment from economics within a representative village and its empirical analysis in Chinese mountainous areas

Abstract

China has been experiencing "Lewis Turning-Point", which means rural labor has been continuously transmitting to manufacturing sector and urban areas, ended up with old or female labor left in agricultural sector. One immediate result from agricultural labor shortage, some pieces of farmland will be abandoned, especially in mountainous area where large-farming-machinery cannot be applied due to terrain restrictions, and labor loss from agriculture cannot be supplemented. In this context, understanding land abandonment is critical for land planning and management. Specifically, it is necessary to figure out which cropland is more likely to be abandoned? To what scale of the land will be abandoned in the future? This article aims to figure out the basic rules behind land use or abandonment decision from a perspective of economics. In China, village is the basic unit for land use and land use rights transferring, thus we introduced a representative village, featured by an average farmland size with distribution pattern following questionnaire survey carried out in Wulong district, Chongqing city. We developed a theoretical land use decision-making model with its objective of maximizing land use incomes among ‘representative village’. This model is employed to simulate land abandonment rate in the year of 2011 and 2020 by changing the external variables given by the market survey, with a result of 9.25% and 33.40% respectively. The simulated land abandonment rate shows only 3.84 percentage point difference with the official data, which certified that this model is reasonable and applicable for land use decision in mountain areas in China. The model also shows a rise of labor wage will lead to huge land abandonment. To counter land abandonment, government should take some measures, such as rise of agricultural product sale price or decline the chemical fertilizer price, to alleviate land abandonment effectively.