| Accompanied by the rapid industrialization and urbanization, China’s ecological environment is increasingly worsening since the reform and openness started in1978. Therefore, it is necessary to protect the ecological environment and improve the conditions of human life for sustainable development. In China, the Grain for Green Project is an important part of forestry ecological environment policies implemented by the central government. With the deep implementation, Grain for Green Project has become an integrated system, which is not only to improve ecological environment, but also to improve industrial structure, increase the income of farmers, reduce regional differences, and serve for the sustainable development of social economy. Recently, the first stage subsidy for economic forest has finished and for ecological forest has partially finished, but the reclamation occurs. Hence, it attracts more research attention on the long-term ecological effects and risks of Grain for Green Project.Using the data of large-scale farmers’ investigation collected by the Research Group of Forest Key Project and Poverty Alleviation in2005,2007,2008, and2009, this study deeply investigates the impacts of Grain for Green Project on farmers’ income both qualitative and quantitative analysis on the basis of resource economics, public economics, institutional economics and other economic theories.First of all, this study revises the Cobb-Douglas production function and builds an extended production function regarding farmers’ income, and then examines the impacts of Grain for Green Project on farmers’ income with balanced panel data. The results show that Grain for Green Project has positive effects on farmers’ total income. However, the incomes from different sources are unbalanced, which makes their contributions to total income differ. With the implementation of the project, the wages income of farmers contributes to total income increasing, which means the project reduces farmlands and releases the labor force to other industries. Therefore it is reasonably to infer that the project positively affects the farmers wage income.Second, based on the concept of income structure similarity, the similarity of income structure between farmers who are involved in the project and who are not decreased at the beginning, but it went up after a while. This phenomenon implies that operational income is not the main source of farmers’ total income. The fluctuation range of income structure of farmer involved is lower than the farmers uninvolved, which reflects that the project is good for the stability of farmers’income. Third, this study examines the rationality of income structure employing DEA non parametric efficiency. The pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of the sample is low, which means farming industry is still in the speed stage in China. This study reveals that the work efficiency is also low. In term of operational efficiency, the technical efficiency and scale efficiency of farmers involved in the project is lower than farmers that are not involved, and it is opposite from the perspective of work efficiency. These findings indicate that the implementation of the project provides opportunities for transferring of rural surplus labor force and increase of farmers’ income, but it did not stimulate the stable transfer of income structure.Finally, this study analyzes the major issues in the process of the Grain for Green Project and suggests to combine Grain for Green Project and the restructure of agricultural industry restructuring, improve the land transfer and forest transfer mechanism to develop intensive agriculture, increase the capital investment on technologies and educational, perfect the institutions of subsidy for Grain for Green Project and explore institutional innovation for ecological subsidy. |
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