Abstract
Urbanization and aging of the agricultural population lead to the insufficient supply of agricultural labor and land being idle in rural China, calling for the farmland lease market to maintain sustainable and efficient use of farmland. However, rural households tend to agree on an uncertain term for farmland leasing in/out, which leads to low efficiency and land loss in agriculture. Therefore, using the survey data collected from 2704 rural households and a logistic regression model, we examine the effects of risk faced by the rural households on the likelihood of the uncertain term for farmland leasing. Results reveal that a large share of labor with low education and high income increase the likelihood of an uncertain term for farmland leasing out activities, while a high disaster frequency, a high education of household and a high share of agricultural income increase the probability of an uncertain term for farmland leasing in activities. Additionally, leasing farmland to/from relatives or neighbors, informal contracts, low rent and the lack of pension insurance also increase the likelihood of the uncertain term for farmland leasing out/in activities. Findings suggest that more attention should be paid to education, agricultural insurance and social security system in rural areas.
Highlights
China, a developing country with the world’s largest population, has about 35% of its labor force in agriculture, compared to 2.5% in the United States
Using the data collected from 2704 rural households from nine provinces of China in 2015, we found that the proportion of rural households that agreed on an uncertain term for farmland leasing out and farmland leasing in is very high, accounting for 36.64% and 44.79% of the two groups of sampled households
This study affirmatively answered the research question, “Why is there so large a proportion of rural households that agree on an uncertain term for farmland leasing in rural China?” Our analysis distinguishes the terms farmland leasing in and leasing out and five sources of risk including unemployment risk, land use risk, production risk, market risk and contract risk
Summary
A developing country with the world’s largest population, has about 35% of its labor force in agriculture, compared to 2.5% in the United States. According to the third National Agricultural Census in 2016, agricultural operators age 55 and above were about 106 million and accounted for 34% of total agricultural operators [1] This means that China suffers from an aging agricultural population. The rural migrant workers increased from about 242 million in 2010 to about 286.5 million in 2017 [2] This migration leads to two main consequences in agriculture. In 2012, 7.54% of the sample rural households left their farmland idle (about 0.57 mu on average) [4]. All of these threaten the sustainable use of farmland resources in rural China
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