Sustainability of Smallholder Agriculture in Semi-Arid Areas under Land Set-aside Programs: A Case Study from China’s Loess Plateau

Abstract

This article analyzes agricultural sustainability in the context of land degradation, rural poverty and social inequality, taking China's Loess Hills as an example. The analysis attempts to understand the multi-dimensionality of sustainability at the farm level and its relationship with physical-socio-economic-infrastructural-technological framework conditions in the context of the land set-aside program viz. the Grain for Green Project (GGP). We developed composite indices of sustainability and its environmental, economic and social dimensions using a principal component analysis (PCA)-based weighting scheme. Regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between the estimated sustainability indicators and the variables representing framework conditions of knowledge, demographics, resource endowment and production techniques. The stated analysis was conducted on a dataset collected by means of household surveys in 2014 in valleys and flood plain areas in Yanhe Township. Findings reveal hidden correlations among the indicators of environmental, economic, and social pillars of sustainability. The ratio of land under the conservation program to actual farmland emerged as a key determinant of overall agricultural sustainability and its social dimension, which reaches the maximum when the ratio is around 0.56 and 0.64, respectively. The results also show that there is need to balance off-farm and on-farm income diversification as well as highlight the role of women in ensuring the sustainability of farming households. The core achievement of the article is the definition of the thresholds for the land set-aside program and the identification of major determinants of agricultural sustainability in the rural Chinese context in particular and in rural farming communities in general.

Linking Food Security with Household’s Adaptive Capacity and Drought Risk: Implications for Sustainable Rural Development

“…In PCA, the correlation between a factor and variable is known as factor loadings. These loadings provide information regarding the contribution of indicators to the variance accounted by each factor (Li et al 2016). The highest factor loading for each variable is highlighted in bold letters in Table 4.…”

Survey data on livelihood assets, activities and outcomes of smallholder farm households in China's Loess Plateau

“…6) “Off-farm Work” is the information of household members who engaged in off-farm work regarding age, gender, education, skills, wages, investments, duration, and destination, and 7) “Livelihood and Total Consumption” covering total consumption of food, energy, education and health care. The survey has already supported studies on sustainability assessment and the resilience building of SES [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] .

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“…In particular, migrant work means that a household member leaves for work for at least six consecutive months in a year. In addition, the calculation of total active workforce in person-day equivalents, farmland fragmentation, family labour in per-capita equivalents, livestock unit, net incomes and net margins, amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, liquidity and solvency, and protein intake is described in the previous publications [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] . Farm prices, which vary across households, were taken into account for goods and services.…”

The Method and Model of Ecological Technology Evaluation

“…In July to August 2018, we carried out soil and water conservation techniques survey in Changwu County [57], Ansai County [58], Mizhi County [59] and Hengshan County [60]-typical soil erosion areas in the Loess Plateau [61,62]. In these four counties, 87 small watersheds were selected to investigate and obtain technical data of soil and water conservation.…”