Exploring the Dynamic Mechanisms of Farmland Abandonment Based on a Spatially Explicit Economic Model for Environmental Sustainability: A Case Study in Jiangxi Province, China
By Hualin Xie, Peng Wang, Guanrong Yao. 2014
126 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Farmland abandonment has important impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem recovery, as well as food security and rural sustainable development. Due to rapid urbanization and industrialization, farmland abandonment has become an increasingly important problem in many countries, particularly in China. To promote sustainable land-use management and environmental sustainability, it is important to understand the socioeconomic causes and spatial patterns of farmland abandonment. In this study, we explored the dynamic mechanisms of farmland abandonment in Jiangxi province of China using a spatially explicit economical model. The results show that the variables associated with the agricultural products yield are significantly correlated with farmland abandonment. The increasing opportunity cost of farming labor is the main factor in farmland abandonment in conjunction with a rural labor shortage due to rural-to-urban population migration and regional industrialization. Farmlands are more likely to be abandoned in areas located far from the villages and towns due to higher transportation costs. Additionally, farmers with more land but lower net income are more likely to abandon poor-quality farmland. Our results support the hypothesis that farmland abandonment takes place in locations in which the costs of cultivation are high and the potential crop yield is low. In addition, our study also demonstrates that a spatially explicit economic model is necessary to distinguish between the main driving forces of farmland abandonment. Policy implications are also provided for potential future policy decisions.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f1f6a2f1a88eb9f46bc05a90814a18c3ef07076
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- An estimation of the extent of cropland abandonment in mountainous regions of China (2018, background): “High elevation and steep slope is a good indicator of land abandonment as it requires high labour input (Shao et al., 2015; Xie et al., 2014; Zhang, Li, & Song, 2014) and has limited accessibility to”