Population Floating And Choice Of Regional Strategy Of Cultivated Land Protection

To cherish and give a rational use to the land as well as to give a true protection to the cultivated land are seen as a basic state policy for China, which requires that the land use management system be strictly enforced,effectively protecting farmland.The system emphasizes the dynamic balance of cultivated land within a province,while takes less account into the uneven distribution of arable land resources and various levels of economic development in each province. In addition, the urban and rural disparities and population migration which are not involved contribute a uncertainty to institutional environment for protection to the cultivated land.The past two decades witness a jump in floating population which is mostly made up of rural population transferring from under-developed areas to developed areas. The way they select part-time farming and live in two separate places could have an influence on the cultivated land change for different regions, and provide possibility for implementing different strategies of cultivated land protection according to the region. A study of population flow and its impact on cultivated land resources utilization and protection for the places that populations floating into and floating out could provide a basis for establishing flexible and dynamic policies for cultivated land conservation and shed light on the counter-measures about protection of cultivated land. This paper includes three contents:Firstly, through calculating on the concentrative degrees of floating population, cultivated land resources plus the location entropy of the cultivated land resources, the distributive characteristics of population flow and cultivated land resources as well as the internal relations between them could be obtained.Secondly, analysis of census data,by using linear correlation,curve fitting methods and Cobb-Douglas (C-D) production function,reveal how the outflow of rural labor affects farmland scale,basic input in cultivated land,farmland utilization patterns and the grain production capacity in the area populations floating out. Furthermore,this article also explores the direct influence of the influx of the migrant labor on urbanization level , construction land expansion and the indirect influence on the cultivated land conservation in the area population floating into. The main conclusions are as follows:1 The benign interaction mechanism between the optimum-scale farm management and the transfer of farming land is absent in the region population floating out. 2 In the region population floating out, the input to agricultural production remains fairly low; meanwhile the consumption for housing grows very rapidly.3 In the region population floating out, the grain production capacity is severely affected by the sown area of grain and the agricultural population.4 For the region population floating in, the higher the level of the economic development, the greater the pressure upon the cultivated land conservation.Lastly, applying the K-means clustering algorithm and Boston Consulting Group Matrix (BMG), all regions are divided into 4 zones based on cultivated land resources and population perspective, and different strategic choice of cultivated land protection according to regions are produced.