The Empirical Research On Farmers’ Willingness To Apply For Timber Felling License

Implementation of the forest cutting quota management system aims to control the consumption of forest resources, increasing the total amount of forest resources, ensuring the sustainable use of forest resources, thus achieving an organic unity of economic profits, social benefits and ecological benefits. With the development of forestry, especially the ownership of trees and forest land contractual management rights were allocated to individual farmers in the collective forest tenure reform in2003, peasant household has become forest management subject by taking the place of collective, while the farmers have the ownership of trees but without the right to harvest trees freely because the quota on forest cutting has the hard rules about forest cutting, which has adversely affected the enthusiasm of farmers engaging in forestry. At the same time, when applying for logging permits, farmers may face lots of problems, such as the complex accreditation procedures, the high accreditation costs, the Long processing time and so on, which makes farmers need to pay a high cost of system on logging practices. Therefore, there is very important practical significance to study the farmers’willingness to accept these systems as well as the other factors that affect their willingness.Based on216groups of investigation data from Pan County in Guizhou Province and Jianshi County in Hubei Province, According to farmers’ different harvesting motivation, the willingness to apply for timber felling license was analyzed by multiple linear regression. The main conclusions are as follows:First, many respondents are not satisfied with the management of logging quota. About2/5of the respondents think that limit harvesting are unreasonable, more than1/3of the farmers do not support logging quota management. And about accreditation system, the support rate is also rather low, more than3/5of farmers said that they may face with lots of problem such as long processing time, high cost, complex procedures and so on when they apply for timber felling license.Second, the forestry operating conditions play a key role in affecting the farmers’ willingness to apply for timber felling license. In the three regression model established in this paper, the forest types, the woodland area and the timber sales price had the significant impact for the three different regression models. And other forestry management variables including forestry income, sources of woodland, wood yield, also had the significant correlation with the explanatory variables. In short, forestry management related variables are strong role on affecting the farmers’ willingness to obtain timber felling license.Third, institutional factors had the significant impact on farmers’ willingness to apply for timber felling license. The regression results of the willingness to apply for cutting sales wood but do not require timber transport permits shown that cutting quota management system impacting on the model reached the significant level, and the farmers believe that the more the logging quota management was reasonable, the more they satisfied to apply for timber felling license; And also, the logging quota management system have the significant correlation with the willingness to apply for cutting own use wood. What’s more, timber felling licenses accreditation system also had a significant impact on farmers’ willingness to obtain a permit, the application cost and the accreditation service quality were significantly affected the willingness to apply for cutting own use wood. These show that institutional factors significantly affect the willingness of farmers’ accreditation.