Impact Of Sloping Land Conversion Program On Farmers' Labor Supply

Until 2011, the Sloping Land Conversion Program(SLCP) has implemented 13 years , and the government has completed more than ninety-five percent of the plan constituted by the State Forestry Administration and the amount of the investment has come to 183.5 billion yuan. Nonetheless, with the continuous progress of SLCP, it's aim is expanded persistently, which has changed from the ecological goals such as "improving forest area, preventing soil desertification and bettering the ecological environment" extending to the economic objectives such as "adjusting rural industry structure, increasing the farmers' income, overcoming poverty and achieving prosperity " The key to realize this economic goals is promoting the rural surplus labor to transfer and increasing off-farm income since it is the linkage among SLCP, increasing income and urbanization which are the central contents in issue concerning agriculture, countryside and farmers. It does not achieve the rural surplus labor transfer overnight, but gradually. Reflecting in farmer's labor supply, it is meaning that the off-farm labor supply increasing, and labor supply of forest, planting and animal husbandry decreasing.Judging from the current documents, the vast majority are studying the effect in off-farm Labor supply of SLCP and they are about some cases point before the 2006 collected the data.The data of this paper which contains six provinces (autonomous region) such as Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong, Jiangxi and Guangxi , fifteen counties and 2070 samples in 1999~2009 year, comes from the Chinese Ministry of Finance and the State Forestry Administration cooperation "Poverty Reduction in Priority Forestry Programs". This paper uses Tobit econometric model, studying impact of farmer's participating in SLCP, farmland area converted to forestland and time for rural household's participating in SLCP, striving to analyzing comprehensively and completely the impact of SLCP on labor supply, and that could help the government review the multi-aim to SLCP.The main conclusions of this paper include three aspects as follows. Firstly,farmer's participating in SLCP, and the more of Farmland area converted to forestland, the longer of years for farmer's participating in SLCP, the more of labor supply for forest activities and off-farm activities increasing , and the more of labor supply for land-based activities decreasing. Secondly, impact of SLCP on labor supply for forest activities, land-based-activities and off-farm activities in Yellow River Basin is more than that in Yangtze River Basin. Thirdly, SLCP is not only promoting farmer's labor supply transferring from farmland to off-farm job, but also increasing farmer's off-farm labor supply.