Analysis Of The Continuation Of The Grain For Green Project

The project on grain for green in the 20th century is a grand program, which has multiple objects of restoring vegetation cover, conserving soil and water, improving ecological environment, optimizing allocation of land resources, and promoting rural economic development. The project involves tripartite benefit including nation, region and person. To gain the effectiveness and continuation of this project, it is very important to make sure the improvement of participating peasant's incomes, off-farm job opportunities, industrial structure of agriculture adjustment and rural ecological environmentThe continuation of the project on grain for green not only is a matter of the implementation and consolidation of the achievements of the project, but also has far-reaching impact on the development of China's western development strategy and the whole country's ecological security, sustainable economic development and social stability. This project has been implemented for more than 11 years until now and has obtained some achievements. What we concern is whether the project can achieve long-term continuation. How can we make sure that farmers wouldn't convert forests back to farmland in order to guarantee the continuation of the project? We take Mei County in Shanxi Province which is a state-level county of grain for green as a typical research area to analyze and explore the economic and the ecology efficiency and influence in order to smooth the implementation of this program and provide corresponding reference for continuation of this program.The ecological benefits of this project are analyzed from following two aspects. In the first place, we survey the respondents' cognitive situation about local environmental. And 73 percent of peasants think that the conversion project from farmland to forests protect local ecological environment effectively. In the second place, the paper evaluates the ecological value of this project by using the contingent valuation method (CVM). The mean annual willingness to pay of single-bounded CVM estimation are 69.37 Yuan/a. The total ecosystem service value of ecological forest is 12 million and 611 thousands Yuan. Author analyzes the economic benefits of this project from two aspects too. Firstly, we use binary Logit model to analyze the factors determining the cropland converting to forests or not. As a result, the cropland which have relatively high planted cost and poor quality were converted to forest, which on the one hand can make the opportunity cost of farmland low and reduce the cost of policy implementation, on the other hand bring down the project attack on peasants' income and increase their acceptance. Secondly, the Difference-in-Difference (DID) estimation method is used to estimate the affect of participating peasant's income. The results show that: participating peasants' incomes are less than the farmers who haven't take part in this program. The reasons are listed as follows, although the project increase the participating farmers' stockbreeding income, their crop production and off-farm income are less than who haven't take part in this project, what's more the participating farmers haven't get full-amount subsidy. As a result, the program hasn't adjusted rural industry and employment structure effectively and if the government ceases subsidies, it is probably the peasant will plant crop again. In short, the economic continuation is worth worrying in the future.In the end, this article proposed relevant policy recommendations for the continuation of the project on grain for green: optimizing the method of subsidies paid out, adjusting rural industrial structure and expanding their sources of income, what's more, establishing the ecological benefit compensation mechanism for the ecological forests based on the evaluation of the ecological value of them.