Agri-environmental Policy Design And Case Study Based On Discrete Choice Experiment

Internationally,many countries are trying innovative Agri-environmental policy(AEP)responses to manage and control farmers' farming behavior with some measure of success.The implementation of AEP is to sign contracts with farmers through Agri-environmental schemes(AES)to promote farmers' adoption of agri environmental technologies(ATEs)to reduce environmental pollution,protect landscapes and biological habitats.And developed countries often exempt small-scale farmers from green obligations.Furthermore,compare to the literature in developed countries,there is also a lack of study focusing on small-scale farmers.However,more than 98% of agricultural entities in China are small-scale farmers,which should be the mainstay of AES promotion.In this paper,the discrete choice experiment(DCE)is used to integrate ATEs and compensation into AES to explore small-scale farmers' preferences,influencing factors and willingness to accept(WTA).Data were collected from 332 farmers in Ningxia Yellow River irrigation area,Heilongjiang Songhua River Basin and Taihu Lake Basin in Jiangsu Province,with 1384 samples in total.This paper studied the AES participation and AETs choice behavior of farmers by region and overall.Mixed logit model(MXL)shows farmers' preferences and preference heterogeneity.We catered for the heterogeneity of farmers' preferences by applying a latent class model(LCM)and further revealed several distinct classes of farmers.The core results are briefly summarized as follows:1.Southern farmers were sorted into two distinct groups based on their preferences for AETs,we labelled class 1 respondents “environmentally-committed farmers” and class 2 respondents “money-driven farmers”.Whether AETs are easy to obtain and implement and food safety issues are the concerns of farmers in the region.We argue that enrolment of “environmentally-committed farmers” should be seen as an important indicator of the “effectiveness” of AES.2.Respondents in the North were also divided into two categories based on their preference for AETs: “labor-saving” and “time-saving”.The area of farmland held by farmers in the north and the average field area are much larger than those in the south.The implementation of AETs will inevitably require more labor and time,which may be an important reason for dominating this classification.3.As a whole,farmers' preference for AETs is obviously heterogeneous.Farmers are divided into three categories: class 1 farmers “pioneer adopters”,class 2 farmers “high-resistance adopters”,class 3 farmers “active adopters”.The average probability of choosing an AES contract is nearly the same for farmers in class 1 and class 3,which is much higher than farmers in class 2.The higher the compensation,the higher the participation rate of farmers in class 1 and class 3.However,class 2 farmers do not have the preferred technology and compensation requirement.4.The heterogeneity of the LCM model shows that preferences have an important role to play in the design of AES.AETs preference and welfare changes will depend not only on levels of the attributes but also on the class that farmers belong to.The fixed top-down implementation method is inefficient.Based on the research,this article gives a flexible and efficient AES implementation plan that meets the needs and preferences of farmers.In short,the research on the AES design carried out in this article is an exploration of green ecology-oriented agricultural subsidy reform practices that promotes the adoption of AETs and ecological environmental protection.It is the initial attempt to promote agricultural subsidy policies with both incentives and constraints.This paper has offered some first evidence to inform the design of effective AES targeting non-point source pollution from small-scale farmland production in China.