Land Tenancy, Contract Term and Land Conservation:Theoretical and Empirical Analyses on Apple Growers
Zhang Lianhua, Huo Xuexi
In China, the population density is very large and the average land area is small, agricultural land resources is scarce. Since Household Contract Responsibility System, farmland is distributed equally among every labour, this has led to serious land fragmentation. Now In order to achieve the scale economy and agricultural modernization, the government has taken some measures to promote transfer of land rights. The most basic way is the land tenancy. In fact，now many farmers has cultivated two types of land: the owned land and rented land. However, land quality degradation is a problem that the world is facing, especially in developing countries. The extensive land management also brought serious land degradation in our country. Land tenure security is widely considered to be a fundamental factor in motivating farmers to adopt sustainable land management practices, the relationship between land property arrangement and land conservation has been the focus of in academia. It is a question worthy of further study that whether land leasing will bring about the reduction of farmers' land conservation. Some studies have pointed out that land leasing will not be conducive to land quality protection and will reduce land quality. However, there has been no research on land lease for perennial crops. Perennial crops have strong asset specificity, and whether land lease for perennial crops will reduce the investment in land improvement measures of farmers, requires systematic analysis and empirical testing. Therefore, this paper takes apple growers as an example to examine the effect of land tenancy on farmers’ decisions to invest in relatively land quality improvement measures.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2019
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