The Economic Analysis On The Control Of Agricultural Non-point Source Pollution In Jiangsu Province

With the rapid development of agriculture in Jiangsu province, the problem of agricultural non-point source pollution is more and more serious. If allowed to proceed unchecked, the pollution in Jiangsu province will continue to erode the ecological environment, affect residents’daily production and life, and even endanger the well-being of future generations, resulting in incalculable loss. Therefore, the control of agricultural non-point source pollution in Jiangsu should be concerned as the essential part of government’s environmental management work in a long period time.The production and control of agricultural nonpoint source pollution follow the logic of’pressure-state-response (PSR)’, which also constitutes the framework of this article. The’pressure’means the reason of pollution; it produces negative effect of the environment. The’state’means that the state of environmental degradation. The ’response’is the government’s effective management measures that include management of existing pollution and source pollution treatment by regulating the behaviors of farmers.Further, agricultural source pollution control can be divided into two aspects: government treatment at the macro level, and farmers’response to policy governance at the micro level.At the macro level, the paradigm on empirical research of economy growth and environmental quality is the environmental Kuznetz-curve (EKC). According to the hypothesis of EKC, there is an’inverted U’relationship between environmental pollution and economic growth, and the quality of environment will not improve with the economy growth until implication of pollution control policy, change of economy scale, technological advances, and transformation of economical structure, et.al act together. So, is agricultural pollution and economic growth in Jiangsu also showing the’inverted U’ relationship? Has the pollution control policy relieve the pollution? By answering these questions, we can seize the status and characteristics agricultural non-point source pollution on the macro level; understand the relationship among agricultural non-point source pollution, economic growth and the governance policies, so as to take correct method to achieve the purpose of macroeconomic regulation of agricultural non-point source pollution.At the micro level, agricultural non-point source pollution control of the developed countries is based on the control of the sources. Control of the sources asks governments to use appropriate controlling policies to adjust farmers’behaviors. The purpose of the adjustment is to reduce pollution by the transformation of farmers’behaviors. Therefore, farmer’s environment-friendly behavior is a key to improve agricultural nonpoint source pollution. Thus, if the sources control policy could lead farmers to use environmentally friendly technology or not is considerable. The second question is what are the factors that influence farmers’environmentally friendly technology adoption behavior? The answers of these two questions help us know of the farmer’s response mechanism under the pollution controlling policy, understand the relationship among household behavior, agricultural pollution and source control policies, and finally achieve the purpose of source control of non-point source pollutionTo sum up, this paper has studied the agricultural nonpoint source pollution and its control from the perspectives of microeconomics and macroeconomics, by using the framework of PSR. As total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) are the main limiting factors in the eutrophication of water bodies, this paper uses total nitrogen and total phosphorus as the main indicators of agricultural non-point source pollution. At the macro level, this paper estimates the total nitrogen and total phosphorus emission of Jiangsu Province by unit survey methods, tests the environmental Kuznetz-curve (EKC) after the introduction of environmental conditions, and uses an empirical analysis to test the impact of policies on pollution. At the micro level, this paper analyzes the response behavior of farmers under the source control policy. Furthermore, this paper also analyzes the agricultural non-point source pollution control practices and their effects by taking Wuxi city as an example. Because of the various ways of non-point source pollution, such as fertilizer pollution, animal pollution, and domestic pollution and so on, various corresponding policies can be taken. This paper will focus on the agricultural fertilizer pollution and the corresponding control policy—the promotional policy of formula fertilizer technology. And take it as an example to analyze farmers’response behaviors at the micro level. The main reasons are as follows. First, the agricultural fertilizer pollution is the principal sources of agricultural non-point source pollution. Second, the promotional policy of formula fertilizer technology policy is the typical policy used to control fertilizer pollution in Jiangsu Province with early beginning and large scale. This policy carried out as early as 2005 in the whole province.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:1. The main sources of agricultural non-point source pollution in Jiangsu province are the ways of chemical fertilizers, livestock husbandry, aquaculture, solid waste of farmland and domestic pollution coming from rural life. The emission of total nitrogen and total phosphorus are 0.4507 million tons and 0.0554 million tons in 2009, while the emission of total nitrogen and total phosphorus are 0.2275 million tons and 0.0318 million tons in 1978. The data all above is calculated by unit survey methods. With the policy of reform and opening-up, the emission of total nitrogen and total phosphorus go up steadily except in the years of 1997 and 2007. On average, the units of chemical fertilizers and livestock husbandry are the principal sources of total nitrogen emission, their contribution rates are 43.89% and 33.4% respectively. To total phosphorus emission, the main sources is still the units of livestock husbandry and chemical fertilizers too, but their contribution rates are different, with the number of 50.47% and 20.83% respectively. In recent years, chemical fertilizers and livestock husbandry unit are the most active factors which propel the total quantity of pollution emission.2. The verification result of EKC shows that there is a significant’inverse-U’relation between agricultural non-point source pollution and GDP per capita in Jiangsu province.By adding environmental limiting conditions, EKC curve may be intersected with environmental security cordon, which can be primarily concluded according to the reality of Jiangsu province. Moreover, the type of environmental Kuznets curve is no longer the ideal type. Taking fertilizer pollution and promotional policy of formula fertilizer technology as an example, there is an’inverse-U’relation between economic development and fertilizer pollution. In addition, the promotional policy of formula fertilization technology maybe the important reason of the existence of EKC’inverted U’shape after ruling out other possible causes.3. According to’Overall program of comprehensive management on water environment in Taihu Lake Basin’and the control practice of Jiangsu Province. This paper divides the pollution control policy into two chronologically. One is named as overall promotional policy of formula fertilization technology, which is carried out in the year of 2005; the other is named as comprehensive governance policy, which was implemented as soon as cyan bacteria events of Wuxi Taihu section occurred in 2007.By constructing economic impact factor model, this paper empirically analyzes the effect of control policies on agricultural non-point source pollution in Jiangsu province. The results showed that:the promotional policy of formula fertilization technology has a negative influence on total nitrogen emission, but has no significant effect on total phosphorus emission; the comprehensive governance policy since 2007, has a significantly negative effect on both total nitrogen emission and total phosphorus emission.4. By taking rice farmers in Jiangsu province as an example and constructing a model of household behavior of nitrogen fertilizer, this paper empirically analyzes farmer’s nitrogen fertilizer behavior and overall promotional policy of formula fertilization technology. The results are as follows. The governance controlling policy characteristics have significant negative impacts on the application of nitrogen fertilizer. The farmer who has participated in the training on fertilizer knowledge always uses less nitrogen fertilizer than the farmer who has not participated in the training. The farmer who has adopted the formula fertilization technology always uses less nitrogen fertilizer than the farmer who has not adopted the above technology. This means that farmer’s adoption behavior of formula fertilization technology has an obvious negative impact on the application of nitrogen fertilizer.By building a model, this paper empirically analyzes the factors of farmer’s technology adoption behavior of formula fertilization technology in Jiangsu province. Probit model is used to explain the discrete adoption choice (adoption vs. not adoption), and Tobit model is used to explain the choice of the proportion of formulation application to total fertilizer application. The basic empirical conclusions are as follows. The governance characteristics have significant positive impacts on farmer’s adoption choice and the proportion of formulation application to total fertilizer application. Farmer’s demonstrative household, recipe card, the numbers of farmer’s training and the amount of trained people in the village have significant positive impacts on adoption choice. Farmer’s recipe card and the number of training have significant positive impacts on proportion choice. It is worth mentioning that the number of fertilizer shop in village has a negative effect on farmer’s adoption behavior, showing the market failure of fertilizer sales market.5. Using of PSR framework, this paper still analyzes the agricultural non-point source pollution control practices and their effects in Wuxi. The result shows that government is taking positive response and putting many tools into control practices. These tools are including command and control policy tools, economic incentive based policy tools, and voluntary policy tools. Furthermore, compared to the previous year, the reductions of total nitrogen emission in the years of 2007,2008 and 2009 are 252.72 tons,570.41 tons and 294.64 tons less, respectively. At the same time, the reductions of total phosphorus emission in the years of 2007,2008 and 2009 are 2.15 tons,45.84 tons and 19.76 tons less, respectively. Both groups of figures show that the control of agricultural non-point source pollution in Wuxi has reaped preliminary fruit.Finally, according to the conclusions based on the above analysis, many relevant policy recommendations are proposed to control agricultural non-point source pollution control in Jiangsu province.