Research On Geographic Concentration Changes Of China’s Peanut

The peanut industry has obtained great development in China since Reform and Opening Up, but still facing many opportunities and challenges at the same time. Under the serious situation of higher external dependency of oilcrops and edible vegetable oil, the tight balance of supply and demand both peanut kernels and peanut oil, strong demands of direct and squeezed peanut, the peanut planting area of some traditional production provinces is slightly shrinking, exports and the world rankings of peanut kernels and peanut oil are consantly declining, peanut production cost continues to rise with the fluctuations of price, which are pounding the steady development of peanut industry. As urbanization continues to push forward, the land used for non-agricultural will continue to increase, how to play regional comparative advantage and how to optimize the peanut geographic concentration on the premise of not to battle for land with food will contribute to improving it’s comprehensive production capacity and self-sufficiency rate of vegetable oil, meeting domestic demands of peanut and its processed products.The logical order of this study are:Firstly, using the production-scale index, growing area concentration index, the method of evolution of production center of gravity, efficiency, scale and comprehensive comparative advantage index, the article analyzes the changes of peanut geographic concentration and existing problems from multiple aspects and angles; Secondly, using the macro statistical data to analyze empirically the influencing factors of peanut geographic concentration changes in stages and find out main influencing factors under different economic systems; Thirdly, using peasant household survey data and Heckman sample selection model to analyze the influencing factors of farmers’peanut planting intention and planting scale to deepen the understanding of the adjustment of peanut planting structure and the driving mechanism of geographic concentration changes; Lastly, putting forward optimization measures of the peanut geographic concentration and reasonable policy measures to guide farmers’peanut production behavior.The results show that the East China and the South China are still peanut production advantage regions in China; the capacity of peanut production in Central China is improving rapidly, which makes Central China, the traditional peanut production region, the biggest peanut production region since1978; As an emerging peanut production region, the peanut production comparative advantage of the Northeast has gradually enhanced. Concentration of peanut production decreases in China. The center of gravity of peanut production moves to north-east. There are some problems in the peanut geographic concentration in our country, such as the efficiency comparative advantage of peanut production is not consistent with the scale comparative advantage; the peanut production-scale index of some traditional provinces fells; the regional differentiation of peanut production and consumption increases.Two stages of the empirical analysis results show that the influencing factors of the changes of peanut geographic concentration are different in different economic systems and the magnitudes of different factors are also different. Peanut geographic concentration changes are positively affected by the natural resources, the ratio of economic benefit, technology and demand factors both in Planned and Market Economic System. The influence of social-economic factors on peanut geographic concentration changes is higher than the other factors in Market Economic System. The influences of non-agricultural employment opportunities on peanut geographic concentration changes are different under different Economic Systems, Among them, in Market Economic System, the influence of non-agricultural employment opportunities is negative, and the magnitude is higher than the other variables, namely, non-agricultural employment opportunities have strong negative impact on peanut production, which can explain partly the decline of the peanut production-scale index in China’s eastern and southern coastal regions. Although the influence of non-agricultural employment opportunities is statistically significant in Planned Economic System, the influencial direction is synthetic, which shows that non-agricultural employment opportunities have no negative impact on peanut production. The improvement of transportation conditions will promote peanut production. Currently, the peanut seeds subsidy policy has no significant influence on peanut production.The empirical analysis on the influencing factors of farmers’ peanut production behavior shows that the proportion of non-agricultural income accounts for total household income has significant negative influence on planting willing and planting scale; the comparative economic benefit of peanut, smooth degree of sale, the distance from its county (city) government and peanut planting years has significant positive impact on planting willing; the average age of agricultural labor force and the distance from peanut processing enterprises have negative impact on planting willing; the agricultural technology training, the number of agricultural labor force, family arable land, the distance from its county (city) government and smooth degree of sale have significant positive impact on planting scale. Macro and micro data model can support each other roughly.Based on the above conclusions, the following respects should be paid attention to in the process of peanut geographic concentration optimization:giving full play to the regional comparative advantage of peanut production, strengthening the government’s support and protection, paying special attention to the peanut industry area construction and increasing research investment to the peanut breeding and cultivation techniques, enhancing the leading role of the peanut processing enterprises for peanut planting. The farmers’ behavior of peanut production should be guided reasonably by establishing and perfecting the peanut price formation mechanism, controlling the prices of production materials reasonably, increasing the peanut subsidies, improving the rural land circulation policy to promote the scale management and giving preferential or reward to traditional and large-scale peanut planting farmers.