Impact Of The New Round Of Land Certification On Farmers’ Land Protection Behavior

The people are the foundation of the kingdom,food is the first necessity of the people,and the earth is the root of the farmer.Cultivated land is the material carrier and endowment basis of human existence,production and life.All grain and food come from cultivated land directly or indirectly.As for China,a large agricultural country with a large population and little land,the importance of land protection cannot be overemphasized,especially in the context of the century-old changes,the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.In fact,as early as 1986,China had formally established land protection as a basic state policy that must be adhered to for a long time.Along with the deep construction of ecological civilization,the protection of cultivated land in China has gone through three stages: the red line protection based on quantity,the balance protection based on quantity and quality,and the production capacity protection based on quantity,quality and ecology,and it gradually formed a trinity of cultivated land quantity,quality and ecological comprehensive protection pattern.However,although the central government has repeatedly stressed the protection of cultivated land and made continuous efforts to this end,and achieved certain phased results,the outstanding problems such as the continuous decrease in the quantity of cultivated land,the overall low quality of cultivated land and the serious ecological destruction of cultivated land still need to be solved urgently.The foundation of land protection lies in property right protection.Land tenure system is a basic institutional arrangement in rural economic society.It plays an irreplaceable role in safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of micro-economic subjects,invigorating the use value of land resources,and promoting the optimal allocation of land resources.It is conducive to stimulating people’s initiative,enthusiasm and creativity in protecting and utilizing land resources as well.Different land tenure systems contain different incentive and restraint mechanisms,and have a differentiated impact on land protection.Currently,China implements the land tenure system with collective ownership and household contract as the core.To a certain extent,this system is the product of the path dependence of the people’s commune system and land private system in the early period of new China.It not only re-establishes the household as the basic unit of agricultural production,but also retaines the collective ownership system framework of “three-level ownership and community-based”.In essence,it means that the collective grants part of the land property rights to the contracting farmers equally through the contract mode of phased contracting and equal land authorization,and farmers have the land property rights within the collective scope in the average sense of a certain period of rights and a certain range of rights.Therefore,with the change of human-land relationship,the system will inevitably face the problems of unclear property right,unstable property right and incomplete property right.As a result,farmers’ holding of cultivated land lacks stable expectation and sufficient incentive,and then they adopt slack operation and short-term behavior for the utilization of cultivated land,which is the institutional root of farmers’ weak protection of cultivated land and unreasonable utilization of cultivated land resources.The clear definition and effective protection of property rights are the premise and foundation for the sustainable development of economic society.As vivid practice of the definition of property rights of cultivated land and the basic content of the system of property rights of cultivated land,land certification has a profound impact on the micro-economic behavior of farmers and the development of agriculture and rural economy.In 2013,the Chinese government launched a new round of land certification reform.By clearly defining the physical boundary of cultivated land and the property rights boundary for exercising cultivated land rights,and issuing legal and multi-purpose land certificates to farmers,it is beneficial to address the issues of unclear property rights,unstable property rights and incomplete property rights,and thus,to improve the clarity,stability and integrity of land property rights.In doing so,it theoretically contributes to stimulating farmers’ land protection behavior,and thereby helping to the coordinated promotion of the "trinity" of cultivated land quantity,quality and ecology protection.However,the research on land certification mainly discusses its economic effect,focusing on the land transfer,agricultural investment and farmers’ credit,and other fields,among which land transfer is the most in China.In contrast,there is little evdience on the ecological effect of land certification,and insufficient attention is paid to the protection of land in the process of agricultural production.The sporadic literature on the relationship between land certification and land protection also mostly stay in the qualitative level of discussion,and lack of empirical test.In view of this,based on the literature review,this study takes the new round of land certification as the research object,follows the logical main line of “problem status-policy shock-behavior response-system performance”,uses nationally representative data of the China Rural Household Panel Survey(CRHPS),draws lessons from the theory of property rights,farmer’ behavior,agriculture sustainable development and institutional change,utilizes the panels fixed effects model,panels random effects model,time-varying DID model,PSM-DID model,proxy variable method and instrumental variable method,and empirically examines the impact of the new round of land certification on the quantity protection,quality protection and ecological protection of cultivated land by taking farmers’ land abandonment,use of organic fertilizer,use of chemical fertilizer and pesticide as examples respectively.The main results can be summarized as follows:First,land certification can significantly strengthen the protection of cultivated land quantity,so that the cropland abandonment area will be decreased by at least 0.2 mu.This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests and overcoming endogenous bias.The mechanism test shows that land certification mainly restrains the expansion of cropland abandoned area by improving soil fertility,promoting the land transfer,increasing agricultural subsidy availability,and raising agricultural income level.Further analysis indicates that land certification not only significantly inhibits the cropland abandonment in plains,without villagers’ conventions,and economically developing communities,but also significantly reduces the area of arable land abandoned by non-transferring households,and households who have not undergone land adjustments.In a word,land certification is conducive to the protection of land quantity.Second,land certification will significantly strengthen the protection of cultivated land quality and help to improve the soil fertility of cultivated land.It increases the probability of farmers using organic fertilizer by about 15%,increases the organic fertilizer input by about 35 yuan per mu,and aslo increases the application amount of organic fertilizer by about 23 kg per mu.Mechanism analysis shows that land certification mainly increases the probability of farmers’ organic fertilizer use through channels such as stabilizing farmers’ property rights expectations,reducing fertilizer input,and increasing the availability of agricultural subsidies.Further analysis reveals that the effect of land certification on the use of organic fertilizer is heterogeneous.From the perspective of agricultural management characteristics,land certification mainly exits a positive and significant effect on the use of organic fertilizer by smaller-scale farmers and farmers planting food crops,while it has no significant effect on the larger-scale farmers and farmers planting cash crops.From the perspective of the status of land tenure,land certification mainly exits a positive and significant effect on contracted households and farmers without land adjustment experience,while it has insignificant effect on transfer-in households and farmers with land adjustment experience.Third,land certification will significantly strengthen the ecological protection of cultivated land and help reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.Through improving the stability,security and integrity of land property rights,land certification strengthens the ecological protection of cultivated land at the farmer level.It not only reduces the input of chemical fertilizer by 17%,but also reduces the input of pesticide by 12%.However,the impact of land certification on land ecological protection also has certain heterogeneity.Land certification mainly has a significant impact on small part-time farmers and the older generation of farmers,but has no effect on large part-time farmers and the new generation of farmers.Further analysis found that the effects of land certification on chemical fertilizers and pesticides are not only reflected in the input,but also in the use.Land certification reduces the fertilizer application per mu of farmers by 9.41 kg and the pesticide application per mu by 143.14 ml,which do contribute to the ecological protection of cultivated land.Based on the above conclusions,this paper holds that when the new round of land certification is completed,it is necessary to actively promote the diversified application of the new round of land certificates,and give full play to the positive role of land certification in the quantity,quality and ecological protection of cultivated land.In particular,the government should focus on the internal connection between land certification and land protection,make good use of the results of the new round of land certification,guide farmers to curb cropland abandonment,increase investment in organic fertilizer,and reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.Furthermore,the government should also take the reform of land certification as a new opportunity,strive to promote the transformation of agricultural land property rights reform from the definition of property rights to the implementation of property rights,and continuously improve the clarity,stability and integrity of agricultural land property rights,so as to solidly promote the construction of land tenure system oriented towards sustainable agricultural development.