Research On The Impact Of Natural Disaster Shock On The Cropping Structure

In recent years,global natural disasters,market risks,geopolitical conflicts and other external shocks have occurred frequently,affecting food production and supply in many ways.As an agricultural country and the world’s largest developing country,food security has always been a top priority for the CPC and the government.The No.1 Document of the Central Committee in 2023 proposed that the main goal of China’s grain work in the next year is to "focus on stabilizing the area,focusing on the yield per unit area,and strive to increase production",which indicates that maintaining a steady increase in the planting area of grain crops and meeting the rigid growth of food demand is an important practical problem facing China’s agriculture.However,the nature of natural reproduction of agriculture makes it the industry sector most vulnerable to external shocks and influences,and also an industry with vulnerability.In particular,natural disasters and extreme climate events have an important impact on farmers’ production and crop planting structure and layout,which has led many scholars to study the relationship between resources,environment,natural disasters and agricultural development.Seen from the existing literature,scholars have conducted a lot of demonstration on the related factors leading to the change of crop planting structure,but most of them focus on the influence of social and economic factors,insufficient research on the impact of natural disasters on crop planting structure,and lack of theoretical explanations for farmers’ adaptive behavior decisions to cope with the external impact of natural disasters.Therefore,this paper takes natural disaster impact as a research perspective to discuss its impact on crop planting structure and its internal mechanism.Drawing on the practice of mainstream economics,this paper also demonstrates the internal mechanism of the impact of natural disasters on farmers’planting decisions and choices,and attempts to discuss this research topic through the combination of macro and micro methods.This paper aims to enrich the economic interpretation of the impact of natural disasters on crop planting structure,and strives to provide practical guidance for agriculture to cope with natural disasters to a certain extent,as well as reference schemes,scientific decision-making basis and practical support for government publicity and promotion of agricultural technology and disaster prevention and reduction information.Given that the occurrence of natural disaster impact events is characterized by strong uncertainty and wide distribution range,this paper,based on disaster economics,household behavior economics and other relevant theories,takes the provincial data of 31 provinces in China from 2000 to 2020 as the analysis panel to investigate the impact of natural disaster impact on crop planting structure.Based on the data of China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)in 2010 and 2014,the impact of natural disasters on farmers’planting decisions at the micro level was further discussed.First of all,this paper summarizes the views and relevant theories of domestic and foreign scholars,and expounds the impact mechanism of natural disaster impact on crop planting structure,the impact mechanism of natural disaster impact on farmers’ planting decisions and the internal logic of economic subjects to adapt to the impact of natural disaster.Secondly,the temporal and spatial distribution of natural disasters and the evolution of crop planting structure in China were analyzed and described based on macro statistics.Thirdly,based on the two-way fixed effect model,this paper empirically analyses the impact of natural disasters on crop planting structure,and carried out a series of comparative analysis for regional heterogeneity.Finally,based on the binary Probit model,the paper empirically tested the impact of natural disaster on farmers’ planting decisions,and conducted a supplementary demonstration on farmers’ planting behavior at the micro level.The study found:(1)The impact of natural disasters makes provinces more inclined to increase the planting proportion of food crops.Every 1 percentage increase in the intensity of natural disasters increases the planting area proportion of food crops by 3.2%.However,the impact is mainly reflected in the current period,and the impact on the planting structure of food crops is more significant in the provinces that are not the main producing areas,the provinces in the eastern and western regions and the provinces in the northern regions.(2)The influence coefficient and marginal effect of natural disaster impact on farmers’ planting decisions of food crops are significantly positive at the level of 1%,while the impact of growing cash crops is not significant.(3)The impact of different types of natural disasters on farmers’ planting decisions is different.The more frequent and longer the duration of disasters,the more significant the impact on farmers’ planting decisions.Based on the above findings,the policy implications derived from this paper are:First,we should strengthen the construction of disaster prevention and reduction in farmland,and strengthen agricultural defense against natural disasters.Second,we should complete and perfect the disaster prevention system of agricultural insurance and increase the support for grain farmers.Third,improve the early warning and prevention mechanism in disaster-prone areas,accelerate the improvement of varieties and increase investment in seed industry science and technology.