Study On Driving Factors Of Cultivated Land Abandonment

A lot of cultivated land has been converted to construction land, along with China rapid industrialization and urbanization in the past three decades. In the meantime, ecological restoration also contributes to decreasing amount of cultivated land. Although Chinese government attaches great importance to the protection of cultivated land and implements the most stringent policies in the world, there are still much cultivated land abandoned all over the country. Recently, more and more cultivated land has been made off cultivation, and something new appears:more and more year-round cultivated land abandonment, recessive abandonment replaced by dominant abandonment, more and more abandonments come from social-economic, and more and more farmers make their land off cultivation actively. Many policies to reduce cultivated land abandonment have been implemented, but there is not any sign indicates land abandonment will stops, even it becomes worse in some areas.Many reasons could arise cultivated land abandonment, most latest researches take a county, a town or a village as a whole to find the reasons why farmers make their land off cultivation in macro-level with qualitative methods, while few researches are conducted from farmers' perspectives with quantitative methods. Household is a basic economic unit in China, and how to use their land is one of the decision-making behaviors. Therefore, based on household questionnaire with face to face interviews with farmers randomly selected in Weishi County, Henan province, this study quantifies the impact of influential factors on farmers' decision about land off cultivation with logit model.This study is constituted of following four parts:(1) First of all, this study reviews the literature of cultivated land abandonment, including the land abandonment conceptions, types, features, reasons and measure methods of number of land abandonment, and then reviews the implement and development of discrete choice models.(2) Secondly, this study analyses the farmers land use behavior with economic man assumption, motivation theory and land property rights stability theory, and elaborates the relationships between land use rights transfer, features of peasant household, features of land and land use. (3) Furthermore, this study takes Weishi County as a study area, makes 500 face to face interviews in twelve villages, and then analyses the properties of all the cases.(4) Finally, based on the features of cultivated land abandonment, this study takes the features of peasant household, features of arable land, income of peasant household, land use rights transfer and land protection awareness as explanatory variables to understand why farmers make their land off cultivation with binary logit model.This study concludes that 64.83% of the surveyed peasant households makes their land off cultivation, and 16% of land owned by the surveyed peasant households is abandoned. The lower income from agriculture than other industries is the most important cause why the farmers abandon their land. In addition, the great reliance on the social security function of land, the unsound system of land use rights transfer and the weak consciousness of land protection also are the important reasons of land abandonment.The analysis results of binary logit model reveals how that the age of the head of household, the area of cultivated land, the average income, the proportion of agricultural income, the change of crops price and land use rights transfer affect that whether the farmers abandon their land or not significantly. Older of the head of household, less land abandonment; in current situation, larger area of cultivated land, more land abandonment; higher average income, lower proportion of agricultural income, more land abandonment; higher crops price, less land abandonment; and the spontaneous and disorderly land use rights transfer which occurs in nowadays Chinese countryside could reduce land abandonment to some extent, but the effect is weak.To reduce land abandonment, make full use of cultivated land, based on the results of this study, we suggest that:keep on supporting farmers and agriculture production; improve rural infrastructure, especially the water conservancy facilities; improve the land use right transfer system and social security system; establish monitoring system of land use to assess the influence of land abandonment.