Is Conservation Agriculture Adoption a Blessing or a Curse for Famers’ Agricultural Income?

摘要

China has made great achievements in agricultural development since the “open and reform policy”. However, due to the long time high intensity development mode of farmland, its soil fertility has been seriously deteriorated during the past few decades, which lead to the decline of agricultural products quality, loss of biodiversity and deterioration of environment. Conservation agriculture (CA),which is claimed to generate a number of agronomic, economic and environmental benefits, has been increasingly promoted world widely. Farmers’ adoption behaviors of CA technologies and their influencing factors have been widely explored in both developed and developing countries, but the effect on farmers’ income has been still in fierce debated, of which, the endogeneity caused by farmers’ adoption behavior in developing countries has attracted the most attention. Based on a face to face field survey with 454 rice growers in Jianghan Plain, China, this study aims at shedding some light on the potential impact of CA adoption on farmer’s agricultural income by applying propensity score matching method (PSM) and endogenous switching regression model (ESR). The empirical results showed that: (1) Households in Jianghan Plain showed high participation rate in CA technologies adoption, which consisted of straw returning field and crawfish-rice system in this paper. 91.90% of the interviewed farmers have adopted the at least one of the two above technologies. (2) The average treatment effect (ATT) of the ESR for those who have adopted CA was -1.638, and the average treatment effect of non-adopters (ATU) was -1.244. These indicated that the income effects have a negative feedback to farmers’ decision on CA adoption (43.09%). Further, farmers with deeper cognition of CA, less level of agricultural subsidy were more likely to adopt conservation agricultural technologies. (3) After capturing the endogeneity caused by unobservable factors in ESR results, the average treatment effect (ATT) was -8.681 and the average treatment effect (ATU) of non-adopters was -0.314, which indicated that adopting CA technologies reduced farmers’ agricultural income by 78.68%. Additionally, cognition level of CA supporting policies significantly improved the adoption rate of CA, while traditional agricultural subsidies imposed significantly negative effect on the adoption of CA. Therefore, to help farmers benefit from the CA technologies adoption, policy makers in Jianghan Plain should design more targeted CA supporting policies such as ecological compensation mechanism and CA technology promotion training program. Particularly, due to the CA technologies were adopted involuntarily in Jianghan Plain and the determinants of the CA technologies vary considerably among the regions, the above results can only provide policy implication for regions with similar situations.