Grain Production Efficiency In Jiangsu Province

China successfully feeds 22 percent of the world population with 7 percent of world arable land in the tortuous development. In 2013, China’s total grain output exceeded 600 million tons, achieving the "tenth consecutive increase". The emphasis for food security in China has risen although the inspiring food production has shown the hope. China has to rely on itself to solve the food security problem and the only path to achieve this goal is improving food productivity. Jiangsu Province is one of China’s major grain producing areas. Without doubt, Jiangsu Province has the important mission to ensure food security.Sustainable increasing food production has become one of the modern features of Jiangsu along with the accelerating industrialization and urbanization. Both the nature conditions and socio-economic conditions in Jiangsu are very conductive for grain production, but Jiangsu still faces many inherent constraints and challenges in growing crops, such as decreasing arable land, declining soil quality, less rural labor population, lower proportion of moderate operations and so on. Faced with these challenges, how to ensure and improve food production in Jiangsu has become an extremely important research topic at present. Therefore, studying farmers’ food productivity is not only of great practical significance, but also very significant to guarantee food security in Jiangsu Province and even in our country.This research explores the overall grain production in Jiangsu Province, and then studies the single-factor productivity, total factor productivity and technical efficiency in the level of farmers in Jiangsu Province. First of all, this research starts from the theories of production efficiency and summarizes the current research literatures in this area. The data used in this research comes mainly from the observation points of Agricultural Costs Survey in Jiangsu Province which collect the farmers’ situations and behaviors in producing rice, wheat and indica rice. In the evaluation of total factor productivity (TFP) and technical efficiency (TE), the data envelopment analysis (DEA) is mainly used in this research to build a model of efficiency evaluation in the level of farmers in Jiangsu Province. According to the results above, some main conclusions of this study are given and several policy recommendations are proposed to improve the efficiency of household food production in the level of farmers. There are seven chapters in this research.Chapter 1 is the introduction. In this chapter, after looking at the background of this research, I will propose the research objectives and the significance of this research given the content of this study, methods and frameworks.Research progress on productivity theory and empirical studies will be conducted in Chapter 2, which provides the theoretical and methodological basis for this article.Chapter 3 is a detailed description of grain production in Jiangsu Province and of the data sources and indicators of this research, including macro and micro data. The micro data is mainly from the Agricultural Costs Survey in Jiangsu Province.Chapter 4, divided into 2 parts. Part one deals with the single factor productivity of three grains, namely labor productivity, land productivity and the productivity of mechanical fees and chemical fertilizers. The main conclusions are as following. The number of days required for food production per unit has decreased, the labor productivities are not very high, at the same time, the yield and value performances of machinery and fertilizer per unit area are ordinary or even deline. Besides, the costs of seeds have risenin addition to the input of pesticides. Second part of Chapter 4 focuses on the analysis of household income and profit in detail. Although the household income showed a slow upward trend overall, but the net profit of farmers is not optimistic. The net profit of japonica and indica rise displayed the similar trend from 2004 to 2011, experiencing a relatively large decline before a later gradual increase back to the initial level in 2004, meanwhile the net income of wheet suffered a downward trend; the figure of 2011 is 87.5%lower than that of 2004.Chapter 5 measures the TFP about three grains in the level of farmers in Jiangsu Province from 2004 to 2011 by using the output and input indicators. As a whole, the TFPs of three grains have some slight increase and the contributions of technical efficiency change are larger than that of technological change. In addition, the increase of technical efficiency is mainly due to the scale of efficiency. This chapter also measures the static technical efficiency of three grains from 2004 to 2011.Chapter 6, according to the farmers’ level of technical efficiency losses, analyzes the savable inputs with the same production and the released output with the same input under the same circumstances, and predicts the potential of gratin production of Jiangsu Province by using the micro-farmers inputs and outputs slacks and macro-grain acreage of Jiangsu Province, which is very meaningful for the sustainable production of grain production in Jiangsu Province.Chapter 7 is the summary of this research, including the former conclusions, policy recommendations, inadequacies of this research and some possible improvements for further research on productivity of food in Jiangsu Province.