دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی آیا زمین برای کاشت ذرت مناسب است؟ مطالعه بهره وری استفاده از زمین در چین - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

To assess land quality for cropping, this study developed a land performance indicator (LPI), namely efficiency of total land productivity potential (TLPP), by incorporating the heterogeneity of land quality for individual agricultural production units when evaluating the performance of land for corn planting, using stochastic frontier analysis. Without taking into account land quality, the technical efficiency (TE) of corn production cannot be reasonably compared across regions because the variation in land quality is significant. The estimated mean TE was 0.77, which illustrates that there is still potential to increase output by 23%, without increasing inputs, if all agricultural production units emulate the best performing production units. The results demonstrated that the mean LPI was 0.273, with a maximum value of 1.0, implying that a large gap exists between the minimum optimum use of TLPP and observed TLPP. This finding indicates that corn planting units can achieve the same outputs with less land inputs through improving the land productivity per unit. The results also revealed that operational units with greater farm area are likely to be more efficient than with those with a smaller area, which suggests that enlarging farm area and promoting household cooperation and joint management practices are imperative to achieve agricultural modernization, enhance the competitiveness of China’s agricultural production in the global market, and effectively disengage labor from agricultural production and transfer the resulting surplus labor to cities.

6. Conclusion

Previous studies have found that farm size is one of the necessary inputs for assessing land use efficiency. However, it is a challenge to incorporate heterogeneity in land quality per unit when evaluating the performance of land in e.g., corn planting. In this study, we sought to fill this research gap by estimating the production function and technical inefficiency model, on the basis of which we calculated values of land performance indicator (LPI). The results showed that the mean technical efficiency (TE) of the farms studied was 0.77, which means that output could be increased by 23% without a change of inputs if all agricultural production units learned from the best performing production units (i.e., those with the highest levels of TE).

The results also showed that the mean LPI was 0.273, with a maximum value of 1.0, indicating that there is a large gap between the minimum optimum use of cultivated land TLPP and the observed TLPP. This indicates in turn that the agricultural production units studied can achieve the same outputs with less land inputs, e.g. the agricultural output can be increase not necessary by increasing the land area size, but more attention might be paid on how to improve the cultivated land productivity per unit. This finding corroborates the rationality and potential of the “storing food in the land” policy.