Integrated assessment of sustainable agri-food production system in Shaanxi Province, China

摘要

With a growing population and a rising standard of living, how to maintain food production that meets the increasing demand for food without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs is becoming a pressing issue for the global community, especially in developing countries. In China, sustainable agricultural developed is loudly advocated because of the critical environmental challenges facing its agricultural sector. This study adopts an integrated framework that considers the economic, social, and environmental perspectives simultaneously to understand how agricultural practices in land use and irrigation affect the sustainability of food production systems and how economic, social and ecological goals are perceived and prioritized by peasants.;By using Analytic Hierarchy Process method, this study investigates peasants' perception of sustainability and their preferences of crop land use and irrigation technique in agricultural food production. The surveyed data were collected in 2014 in four prefectural city-regions, including Xi'an, Xianyang, Baoji, and Weinan in Guanzhong Plain, Shaanxi Province, China. The empirical results show that economic benefits are weighed higher than social benefits and environmental impacts by peasants in the study area. With respect to crop land use, peasants prioritize fruit, wheat and corn more than vegetable, cotton, soybean, and canola. In irrigation technique, peasants prioritize sprinkling, drip-irrigation and well-irrigation more than other non-water-saving methods in agricultural production. The sensitivity analysis indicates that if agricultural sustainability is required to be optimized, the trade-offs among crop land uses and among irrigation methods might exist between cash crops and rotation crops, and between water-saving irrigation techniques and well-irrigation.