Modeling Agricultural Land Use Change in Bangladesh: Farmer as an Agent of Change

摘要

Agriculture in Bangladesh is already under pressure both from huge and increasing demands for food, and from problems of agricultural land and water resources depletion. To meet the increasing food demand, Bangladesh can either increase food grain import or can increase crop productivity. Since land is a scarce resource in Bangladesh, the only choice is to increase in cropping intensity. In this research a 'Farmer Model' is developed which considers the behavioral aspects of a farmer regarding agricultural land use change focusing on crop combination and crop intensification. A farmer would adopt any land use based on cost/return comparison and risk minimization that might be associated with these actions. A biophysical crop production model 'Spatial-EPIC' was used to simulate crop production. Land use change was simulated using 'AGENT-LUC' model. In this model, an agent is considered as the decision-maker of the land use change. 'Spatial-EPIC' and 'AGENT-LUC' are integrated with 'Farmer Model' in order to develop agricultural land use change scenarios in response to rapidly growing food demand. Spatial-EPIC model has been implemented in GIS environment at 10km grid size whereas AGENT-LUC model has been implemented in GIS environment at 1 km grid size. The model was run for the period from 1995 to 2004. The output for the period 1995-98 was used for the model validation and the output onwards was used for future land use prediction. Various scenarios would be studied considering different cropping pattern, cropping intensity and policy options etc. As large amount of data sets is needed to be managed and processed for such models, GIS was extensively used as the pre and post processor of the input and output data.