Different Types Of Households’ Decision On Transfering And Farmland Abandonment Based On The Perspective Of Livelihood

Livelihood capital is the material basis for farmers’ survive and development. The number and structure of livelihood is not only the guarantee of households’ risk-averse and sustainable development, but also the impetus of households’ differentiation. Currently many studies have focused on the diversification of households’ livelihoods in developing Counties and areas, especially poverty and ecologically fragile areas. As rational persons, farmers usually choose their livelihood strategies according to their livelihood capitals. They pursue maximum benefit by rationally configured their livelihood capitals. According to these livelihood strategies, agricultural income is no longer only households’ earning sources. Non-agricultural income has already become the important sources of households’ livelihood strategies. The difference of livelihood capital leads to the difference of households’ livelihood strategies. And it leads to the differentiation of households and greatly influenced their behavioral decision makings. Cultivated land is an important livelihood capital for households. Cultivated land not only has economic function, but also has the function of life-support, employment, pension for farmers. The importance of cultivated land, and the arduous nature of the protection all leads to cultivated land become the key for describe interaction system of rural areas.Currently, the linkage reform of household registration system and rural land system are the breakthrough point of urban and rural co-ordination development of Chongqing. Based on the above background, we choosed Yunyang county and Shizhu county for our study. These two counties are all state-level poverty-stricken counties. On the basis of our depth analysis of livelihood capital and livelihood strategy of different kinds of households, we explained the decision-making of farmers’ transfer and abandoned. In this paper, the decision on farming transfer and abandonment from the view of capital natural endowment were expounded through analyzing the features of different households’ livelihood. The households were classified into full-farm households, farm-dominant households, non-farm-dominant households and non-farm households, based on the survey of 376 households in Yunyang County and Stalagnate Tujia Nationality Autonomous County of Chongqing. The results showed that, (1) Households’ livelihood capital increases successively from full-farm households to non-farm households, especially, labour, finance and social capital, while environmental capital is an important driving force of households’ non-farm livelihood.(2) Households’ livelihood strategy was diversified with increasing of their concurrent business level. Full-farm households’ livelihood depended on the land highly, farm-dominant households begin to do some non-farm concurrent business, non-farm-dominant households’ livelihood was most diversified, non-farm households have set foot in construction, service and many other non-farm business;(3) Based on the production and management differences, the land use decision of these four types of households are influenced by, in sequence, survival security, maximum land profit, maximum economic profit and maximum comprehensive profit.(4) The "Rational People" hypothesis in which households were placed regarded the capital natural endowment as a key factor of their decision on farming transfer and abandonment, then, the full-farm households made their decision under the obvious influence of government’guidance because of being short of capital and performed as non-complete rational people; as rational economic man, farm-dominant households show little response to the policy, owing to their dependence on land’s economic benefit, while non-farm-dominant households show vague response to the policy because they would judge and weigh the compensation and loss of farming transfer and abandonment; non-farm households, as a rational decision-maker, possess the most capital, response to the policy actively.(5) The reform of household registration system is taking the non-households as focus group, part of the full-households and non-farm-dominant households as the mobilized. Stimulant and compensation mechanism should be established, policy and project measures should be completed in order to guarantee the orderly transfer of households and to promote their capacity of sustainable development.This paper discusses the impact of capital endowment differences on households’ decision on transfering and farmland abandonment, in order to provide references for promoting household registration reformation and improving the capacity of sustainable development for households.