Farmland Ecological Compensation System Construction Based On The Perspective Of Citizens And Farmers

Farmland ecological compensation was first put forward due to farmland’s relative low economic output as well as huaman’s increasing demand for farmland ecological services.It was widely applied in western countries by signing contracts between governments and farmers to ensure the sustainable developmentof rural landscape and farmland ecological services.In China,farmland undertakes fundamentally economic,social and ecological functions without any economic compensation,thus leading to the degradation of farmland ecological system.Moreover,ever since improving ecological civilization level was put forward by the 12th Five Year Plan on National Economical and Social Development,developed cities,such as Chengdu of Sichuan province,Foshan of Guangdong province,Suzhou of Jiangsu province and Minhang of Shanghai,began to explore their own way to implement farmland compensation policy.How to construct a farmland ecological compensation system,which can meet the practical needs of social development,is of urgent neededin China.In this dissertation,the contents include the theory foundation,estimation of farmland non market value,definition of relevant stakeholders of farmland ecological compensation,estimation of farmland ecological compensation criteria,selection of farmland ecological compensation patterns and ways,fiscal transferring payment of farmland ecological compensation.All of the above contents can provide basic scientific foundation for the construction of farmland ecological compensation system.Specific research and discussion are detailed addressed in the following parts.First,the estimation of farmland non market value is the main foci.Attributes and their levels are selected and defined after referring to literatures,negotiation with experts and potential respondents.They are respectively:farmland area,farmland fertility,water quality,air quality,species richness,recreational value and cost.After Log-likelihood test,heteroscedastical logit model is emploled to explore citizens’heterogeneious preferences for farmland non market value.Results indicate that whether citizens are willing to pay or not,beaware of the farmland’ declining situation or not,and their income level have significantly positive impact on their heterogeneious preferences.While the mixed logit model indicates that farmers have heterogeneious preference for the status quo and recreational value,and their stand error are both significant at 1%level.Then,a reasonale farmland ecological compensation criterion is calculated after taking the implementation cost and farmers’economic loss into consideration.Based on the collected data,the total implementation cost of farmland ecological compensation was calculated by summing up the human cost,space cost,and administrative cost,which is 471.71 Yuan/hm2.Farmers’ economic loss due to the farmland development restriction is 8674.84 Yuan/hm2.Therefore,the farmland ecological compensation criteria based on citizens’ wllingness to pay is 6079.70 Yuan/hm2,while the farmland ecological compensation criteria based on farmers’ willingness to accept is 7532.96 Yuan/hm2.Specially,the under-estimation of implementation cost makes the result of citizens higher than its real value,which will also lead to the error in the calculation of transferring payment among governments.Thirdly,respondents’ selection of farmland ecological patters and ways were analyzed by using multi-nominal logit model.After referring to the relevant literatures on farmland ecological compensation patterns(Chengdu,Foshan,Suzhou and Shanghai)and ways(Cash,Material,Technology and Policy),results of the multi-nominal logit model indicate that for the four compensation patterns,citizens show no obviously different preference among the four patterns.For farmers,Chengdu pattern is most favoured by farmers while Foshan pattern least.As for the compensation ways,cash is favoued most both by citizens and farmers.Their selections of farmland ecological compensation patterns and ways are influenced by their basic-social economic demographics as well as their cognition of farmland ecological compensation.Last but not least,the horizontal transferring payment(among local governments)and vertical transferring payment(between local government and farmers)are estimated respectively.The 48 distracts in Wuhan Metropolitan Area are classified into 23 paying areas and 25 receiving areas based on the food-security model.By applying the ecological compensation criteria based on the citizens’ willingness to pay,the amount of vertical transferring payment is 66.95×108 Yuan and the horional tranfering payment among local governments in Wuhan Metropolitan Area is 43.46×108 Yuan by using the ecological compensation criteria based on the farmers’ willingness to accept.Moreover,after comparing the total amout of transferring payment with their own fiscal income and urban annual disposable income in 2013 respectively,their proportion are 2.92%and 1.91%,the farmland ecological tranferrring payment is of great practical meaning in Wuhan Metropolitan Area.However,limitation still exits:the amount of horional transferring payment maybe overestimated by taking Wuhan as the baseline to calculate the input/output parameter.Moreover,the neglection of human mobility and the imperfect benefit distribution institution will lead to an error in estimating the horizontal transferring payment amount.