Research On The Regional Differences Of Farmers’ Effective Participation In Rural Land Consolidation Project

Rural land consolidation contributes to achieving increasing grain yield, raising peasant income and improving agriculture benefit. As an important measure to promote the new rural construction and solve the “San Nong” problem, rural land consolidation has got Chinese government’s great attention. No. 1 Central Documents in recent years and the Outline of Twelfth Five-Year Plan have made clear statement to launch major and demonstration projects of rural land consolidation, improve the sustainable growth potential of farmlands. Rural land consolidation of our country has made remarkable achievement in the last decade, however there are still many problems, such as project designs divorce from reality because there no proper channels are provided for famers to express their interest demands; the degrees of land fragmentation have not improved after rural land consolidation because of the poor adjustment of the land property rights; the serious problems of projects quality because of the collusion in the construction process which lack of peasants’ effective supervision. These problems have seriously hindered the realization of rural land consolidation goals. The causes of these problems are mainly the lack of farmers’ effective participation, although some local government land departments guide farmers to participate in the projects, but these don’t get ideal results as farmers’ participation become a mere formality or have little effectiveness. Farmers’ effective participation is an important way to enhance the performance of rural land consolidation projects, how to avoid the farmers to participate in a mere formality, ineffective participation and little effectiveness participation is an important issue that needto be addressed urgently in rural land consolidation field. Therefore, this article will study the farmers’ effective participation and influencing factors of the rural land consolidation projects, in order to provide reference for government land department’s incentive policies making which help to improve peasants’ effective participation, it has great significance for improving the rural land consolidation project performance and ensure the national food security.This paper takes the pre-service plain and hilly engineering mode areas in Hubei Province as an example, research subjects are the typical rural land consolidation projects of the Hubei 10 city(county), through the combing of literature and the analysis of thomas decision theory and other related theories, we constructed the measure model of farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation projects which include five dimensions of participation subject, participation field, participation channels, participation depth and participation validity; using the field survey data to measure the effectiveness of farmers’ participation and the regional differences with fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method; on the basis of the measure, analysis of the influence factors of farmers’ effective participation based on human factors systems theory from the participation ability, participation opportunity and participation motivation three aspects, then using the ordered Logistic model to conduct empirical research, analysis and compare the differences of the influence factors in different areas and analyze the reasons; based on the significant factors of influencing farmers’ effective participation, taking path analysis method to reveal the directly and indirect effect of significant factors on the farmers’ effective participation. By studying the main conclusions are as follows:(1) The effectiveness of farmers’ participation is generally low in study areas, the farmers’ effective participation in all stages of the project are differences, and the effectiveness are also different in different areas. From the project as a whole situation, the effectiveness ratio of “ the highest and "the higher” level respectively were 5.70% and 12.57%, and the proportion of “the lower” and “the lowest” level was 50.59%, obviously farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation projects is low. From different regions, the farmers’ participation effectiveness of the pre-service plain engineering mode area is slightly higher than the hilly engineering mode area. From the different stages of the project, the highest of the farmers’ participation effectiveness based on the total sample is the construction and final acceptance stage, followed by the planning and design stage, the site selection and decision-making stage is the lowest; in pre-service plain engineering mode area, the highest is the planning and design stage, followed by the construction and final acceptance stage, the lowest is the site selection and decision-making stage; the ranking results of the hilly engineering mode area is same as the total sample results.(2) Farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation projects is influenced by many factors, through theoretical analysis, this paper construced the influence factors index system from the participation ability, participation opportunity and participation motivation three aspects. From the total sample model results can be seen, the factors including farmers’ negotiation and communication ability, farmers’ resource gathering ability, information disclosure degree, the clear degree of participation program, the clear degree of participation channels, loss compensation standards, the increasing level of agricultural income and the promotion degree of farmers’ own value have significant impacts on farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation projects, which impact most is loss compensation standards, followed by the project information disclosure degree, and the influence is positive.(3) The influence factors of farmers’ effective participation exists regional differences. In pre-service plain engineering mode area, six factors have significant impacts on farmers’ effective participation, and all have positive effects, respectively: farmers’ resource gathering ability, information disclosure degree, the clear degree of participation program, the clear degree of participation channels, loss compensation standards and the promotion degree of farmers’ own value. There are 7 significant factors influencing farmers’ effective participation of Hubei province hilly engineering mode area: farmers’ negotiation and communication ability, information disclosure degree, the clear degree of participation program, the clear degree of participation channels, loss compensation standards, the increasing level of agricultural income and the promotion degree of farmers’ own value. This shows that the farmers’ resource gathering ability and the increasing level of agricultural income have different effects to farmers’ effective participation on different regional.(4) Path analysis says that significant variables both have important direct impact on farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation project, but also have an indirect impact on the effective participation of farmers through interaction with other variables. The research sample path analysis showed that the direct effects of all significant variables are positive, which the factor that loss compensation standards has the biggest direct effec of farmers to participate effectively, followed by information disclosure degree, resource gathering ability is minimum; in pre-service plain engineering mode area, the direct incidence biggest factor is also the loss compensation standards, followed by the clear degree of participation program, the minimum factor is resource gathering ability; in hilly engineering mode area, farmers’ negotiation and communication ability and information disclosure degree have higher direct effects. The combined effect of each significant variable affect on the dependent variable Y(the effective participation of farmers) are less than its direct effect on the Y, this means that each variable is influenced by other factors which are more or less weakened its positive impact on the dependent variable, each significant variable impacts on farmers’ effective participation through the direct effect and the indirect effect.(5) The influence degree of same significant factors of farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation project have regional differences, those factors which include information disclosure degree, the clear degree of participation program, the clear degree of participation channels and the promotion degree of farmers’ own value have important positive effect for farmers’ effective participation, but the degree of influence is not the same, the influence degree of each factor on pre-service plain engineering mode area is greater than the influence on hilly engineering mode area.So in order to improve the effectiveness of farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation projects, this paper puts forward the following suggestions: First, the government land departments should establish the dominant position of farmers in the rural land consolidation project construction, then the government should change the leading role into the oriented role, respecting the autonomy of farmers; Second, establish and perfect the civil society organizations which truly representative the interests of farmers, such as cultivated land protection association, rural cooperatives and so on, to ensure that farmers have the ability to participate. Third, the government land departments should develop specific systems about farmers how to participate in rural land consolidation projects, such as information disclosure, participation program and participation channels, so that farmers’ participation have a strong operational, to ensure that farmers have the opportunity to participate Fourth, the government land departments should establish relevant supporting mechanisms, such as scientific and reasonable loss compensation mechanism, the coupling mechanism of the agricultural characteristic industry development and the rural land consolidation, prompting farmers have an incentive to participate from the external environment Fifth, according to the actual situation around, differentiated to formulate appropriate policies to improve the effective participation of farmers in the rural land consolidation projects.