Search Results (2)

Pest and disease control outsourcing has become an effective means to restore damaged arable land and guarantee agroecological benefits. However, it is adopted at a relatively low rate in China. The purpose of this study is to explore, from the perspective of government intervention, behavioral logic, and the game relationship among farmers, service organizations and the government in the pest and disease control outsourcing system as well as the endogenous motivation of each subject. The results indicate that when the degree of policy implementation is low, the government’s policy is ineffective, but, after reaching a certain level, the higher the degree of policy implementation is, the stronger the farmers’ willingness to choose outsourcing control and the service organizations’ willingness to provide positive control services are, and the faster the stable state of tripartite joint pest and disease control is formed. In the case of implementing a single policy tool, the convergence rate of each party that implements the regulatory policy alone is fast but may be unstable, while the rate is slow but more stable when a guidance- or incentive-based policy is solely applied. The effect of a combination of policy tools being applied is much better than that of a single policy tool being applied. The simultaneous implementation of the three types of policy tools can form a policy system with both positive and negative mechanisms, which can maximize the complementary and superposition effects. Full article

Arable land abandonment has been occurring in China in recent years. Although an emerging number of studies have investigated the impacts of urbanization and labor migration on arable land abandonment, little is known about what roles agricultural outsourcing services play in reducing arable land abandonment. Based on the data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS) in both 2014 and 2016, this study employs a two-stage least squares method to address the potential endogeneity issue and sheds some light on the impact of agricultural outsourcing services for controlling disease and pests in arable land abandonment in China. The empirical results show that disease and pest control outsourcing services (DPCOS) significantly decrease the size of household-level arable land abandonment by 6.59% on average. More specifically, DPCOS mainly reduce the arable land abandonment in regions with the labor shortages, while this does not lead to a significant decrease in arable land abandonment in regions characterized by poor soil quality and steep slopes. Therefore, we may conclude that DPCOS could contribute to the reuse of farmlands suitable for cultivation and the exit of farmlands unsuitable for cultivation. Full article