Empirical Studies On The Development Of Nanjing Urban Agriculture

Urban agriculture is a newly established concept toward urban regional agriculture, reflecting residents’new consumption demand, after industrialization and highly development of developed countries or regions. Urban agriculture is an indispensable and basic industry for Nanjing, from perspectives covering the guarantee of the quality of food provision, realization of the balance between urban and rural area development, fulfillment of the diversified cultural demand of the citizens, and improvement of the eco-environment.The urban agricultural practice was brought up dating back to mid-1990s. After years of development, Nanjing’s agriculture has generally completed its transition from suburb oriented to urban focused. However, there are still some problems to be addressed while the regional economy is speeding up. Under this background, an empirical study of the development of Nanjing’s urban agriculture not only benefit its sustainable, healthy, systematic and orderly prospect but also provide valuable experiences for other cities in the country that under this progress.This Article analyzes the content and the theoretical basis for urban agriculture; introduces the specific situation of Nanjing and indentifies the competitive industries of each district; then establishes the evaluation index system of urban agriculture development based on the previous researches; finally performs horizontal comparisons with similar and well developed cities around Delta Region of Yangze River, such as Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi, Hangzhou, as well a vertical self evaluation from2000-2008. It concludes that from2000-2008, Nanjing’s agricultural development, life and service quality together with ecological environment have all risen up steadily. Viewing from the horizontal contrast, Nanjing is preferred to Hangzhou, Suzhou Wuxi and Changzhou, whereas there is still a gap between it and Shanghai, mainly reflected in the production function subsystem and services function of the subsystem. The largest contributor to the new agriculture construction in Nanjing is the Ecological functional subsystem.Through the analysis of the full text, it is certain that urban agricultural development in Nanjing has accomplished some achievements. However, there still several constrains that Nanjing’s urban agricultural development have encountered, including tightening of land resources, disproportion of agricultural structure, low education of agricultural labor force, inefficiency of the agricultural investment, less organized agricultural industrial management and the imperfect rural social service system. In hope of helping the further development of Nanjing urban Agriculture, this article accordingly proposes the following strategies:enhancing farmer’s skills; speeding up the land transformation; raising the level of agricultural industrial management; improving the contribution of agricultural technology; optimizing the layout of agricultural areas and perfecting countryside social service system.