Apple Growers'Standardized Production Behavior

Large as it is,China is not a strong country in agriculture.Though there is 1349.556 million hectares of arable land in China,with a relevant producing capacity of more than 600 billion tons of grain,80 million tons of meat and 70 million tons of aquatic products,all of which rely on a far huge producing units of 220 million peasant households.The incompatibility between countless households and limited farmland has become the most prominent and fundamental situation in China.So a new proposition of agriculture modernization characterized by output efficiency,outcome safety,resource conservation and environment friendliness is desperately needed to break through the existing predicament in the context of small-scale households.In 1999,the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Finance launched the “Agricultural Industry Standard Formulation and Revision Project” and began to officially implement standardized production in the agricultural sector.In 2001,the Ministry of Agriculture in coordination with the Pollution-Free Food Action Plan,have explored a series of constructions for the Agricultural Standardization Implementation Demonstration in some provinces,which is a tentative pilot work in the implementation level.No One Central Document has also been emphasizing the key role of agricultural standardization in recent years.However,the agricultural standardization in China is more like a top-down institutional reform,and it is accelerated by the government's promotion as well as the theoretical,agricultural and food engineering technology industries.Limited by the development of institutions and market,the strong while hidden demands for the standardized agricultural products don't find its way to become the actual purchases.Apples are high value products(HVP),and the production and management of apple growers not only shares the general characteristics,but also has its unique features.Firstly,compared to grain producing process,apple producing process is more labor,capital and technology intensive,showing excellent management skills and technology capacities of apple growers.Secondly,higher degree of specialization,commodification and marketization of the apple leads to a better adaptation to market changes.Finally,relative supporting regulations by the government are basically in line with the WTO green box policy,making the apple market almost fully competitive with hardly interventions.So,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the general laws of China's agricultural standardization process,to understand the behavioral characteristics and consequences of farmer households in China's agricultural standardization process,and to evaluate the effects of institutional designing,operating and regulating mechanism in the process of promoting agricultural standardization.This research draws lessons from the farmer households' behavior theory,embedding theory and externality theory,carries out normative analysis to theoretical explain the standardized production behavior of apple growers.Then the research describes the basic characteristics of apple growers and their apple production and management.Furthermore,the study applies specific analyzing methods and econometric models to empirically test the market efficiency,network embedment,institutional trust and external regulations.This study is divided into four parts based on the research purpose and design:The first part is introduction.This part summarizes the questions to be solved on basis of the research background,and introduces the purpose and significance,literature review,as well as research path and contents.The second part is the theoretical analysis,corresponding the second chapter of the thesis.On the basis of the definition of relevant concepts,referring the Theory of Farmer Behavior,Embeddedness Theory and Externality Theory,the study analyzes the standardized production behavior of apple growers.According to the theoretical analysis of the farmer development model,the appropriate economic system should be coordinated with the traditional norms and customs.The farmer's production behavior is affected by the internal and external systems,and there are interrelations between different systems.Based on theoretical analysis,combined with the specific situation of apple growers' standardized production,the research hypothesis is put forward.That is,the current lack of effectiveness of the apple standardization market leads to lack of incentives for apple growers to standardize production,and the technology choice is Co-affected by the network effect of technology and the network of farmers,and institutional trust and external regulation are important safeguards for Apple growers to comply with standardized production.The Third part is empirical analysis,including chapters from three to seven.In the third chapter,the study describes and summarizes the general situation of apple industry,survey sampling,survey methods,sample size and basic situations as well as the production and management of the apple growers,respectively.Chapter four is the first section of the empirical study,which analyzes the standardized producing willingness and the premium of the apple growers by Heckman two-stage method,and then calculates the average willingness premium for the comparison with the average willingness premium to pay by the consumers for the standardized agricultural products,to evaluate the effectiveness of the current standardized product market.In the fifth chapter,the study assesses the influence of the embedding relationship network and technology network have on the technology transformation of the apple growers by MVprobit model,based on the theoretical analysis of dual network embedment and the characteristics of horticultural process in apple production and management.In chapter six,the study segregates the institutional trust into market trading system trust and government promotion system trust on the basis of the institutional trust formation process researching paradigm,and then analyzes the impact of institutional trust on apple growers' complying the standardized production technology norms by ordered logit model.In chapter seven,external regulation is divided into two levels of guidance and supervision,and the impact is examined of external regulation on the compliance with standardized production technical norms of the apple growers.The fourth part are the conclusion and policy recommendations,which is the eighth chapter of this study.Based on the empirical results,this study puts forward suggestions for improvement from three aspects: strengthening government regulations,improving farmer households' capacity and improving agricultural standardized production conditions.The research conclusions are as follows:First,the standardized production level of apple growers is low,the land fragmentation is serious,and the scale production is limited.The problem of excessive application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in apple growers is severer,and the awareness of safe production is still weak.Second,the average willingness expectation of apple growers to adopt the pollution-free production is 64.66%,which is higher than the consumers' willingness to pay.In other words,the current consumption willingness premium of standardized agricultural products does not satisfy the producers' production willingness premium,which cannot form the price conditions to encourage apple growers to adopt the standardized production technology voluntarily,and the market effectiveness of standardized products is insufficient.Third,there is a correlation between different technologies in apple production and management,and the linkage effect is obvious;the technology network embedment does lead to "technology lock-in" problem in apple growers' production.With the increasing homogeneity of technology network,the technology conversion probability is significantly downward;the influence of homogeneous relationship network on the technology conversion is not significant,while the heterogeneous relationship network is positively significant.Fouth,trust on both market trading system and government promotion system has a positive and significant impact on the compliance with standardized producing technical specifications of the apple growers,but they prefer trusting the market trading system with “high quality high price” mechanism.After the trust interaction item is added,the return of trust in government promotion system is still significant,which indicates that effect of compliance with standardized production technical specifications by government promotion system on apple growers is more obvious.Fifth,public education,training,inspection and punishment can significantly and positively affect apple growers' compliance with standardized production,while influence of material support is not significant.