Study On The Factors Affecting Farmers’ Desire To Participate In Farmland Consolidation

Land is an important material resource, strengthening and optimizing the management of land resources is the precondition to guarantee the sound development of economy and society permanently. The on-going economic activity of our human society resulted in continuous expansion of construction land, the frequent occupation of agricultural land and conflicts between people and land, all these problems throw a great threat to our food security. As an important means to optimize the management of land resources, farmland consolidation play key roles in solving "three rural" issue, implementing "double insurance" project and balancing urban and rural development. As the ultimate beneficiaries of farmland consolidation and the direct user of farmland, farmers’ participation has gradually become the standard to evaluate the success of agricultural land consolidation. Therefore, in order to carry out farmland consolidation properly, it is very urgent to study the participant willingness in agricultural land consolidation.In our study, based on farmer’s perspective, we choose Pujiang (a county in Chengdu) as our study area, and integrated relative theory and the existing research result to analyze the gotten data, firstly we got the basic information on individual farmer householder, their families, the village or communities they lived in and farmland consolidation project with a questionnaire method. Then we analyzed the present situation of land consolidation in study area, and performed a descriptive statistical analysis on the factors affecting the willingness of farmers to participate in farmland consolidation. We also performed econometric analysis on the factors affecting the willingness of farmers in participating in farmland consolidation to determine the functional direction of the factors and identify the key factors that affect farmers’ willingness by building Binary Logistic regression model, thus put forward targeted suggestions, which will provide useful help for promoting farmers’ enthusiasm and improving the benefits of farmland consolidation. The conclusions are as follow:(1)There are many problems in the process of farmers’ participation in farmland consolidation, for example, the stage and forms of farmers’ participation is very limited; most of the farmers acknowledged the positive effect of farmland consolidation. The positive effect on which are ranked as follows:Improving agricultural production facilities>field merging >improving farmland quality> increasing farmland area. However, a few farmers think there are some side effects in farmland consolidation; most farmers have recognized the importance of their participation in farmland consolidation.(2)Most of the respondents are willing to participate in farmland consolidation. Statistics show that the farmers who expressed their intention to participate in farmland consolidation accounted for 80.09%; the remaining 19.91% farmers clearly stated their unwillingness in participating in farmland consolidation. Judging from the involvement stage, the farmers are preferred to participate in the construction and late management and protection stage, only 11.06% of the farmers declared their willingness to participate in the project reporting and design stage. This indicated that the farmers’ willingness to participate in the latter stages with relatively low technological requirements is very strong.(3)Descriptive analysis showed that except for age variable which adversely affect farmers’ participant willingness, the remaining 10 variables positively affect farmers’ participant willingness. As we can see from the statistical data, the farmers’ passion in supporting farmland consolidation will be higher in the following situations:the older male farmers with good education, the families with more labors, the ones who are optimistic about market expectations price of agricultural products, those who lived in village or communities with good leaders whose attitude to farmland consolidation are more positive, better developed economy, the places where propaganda work was doing better, more transparent decision-making process and finally the higher recognition of farmers.(4)Binary Logistic analysis showed that gender of the surveyed households, transparency of the project decision, degree of farmers’ recognition, farming or not, market expectations price of agricultural products and education level will positively affect farmers’participation in farmland consolidation. However, economic development level of village or communities has a negative effect on farmers’ participation. No significant effects of farmers’ age, family labors, and village cadres’ attitude to farmland consolidation and project publicity degree on farmers’ participation in farmland consolidation were observed in our study.(5)To arouse the enthusiasm of farmers’ participation in farmland consolidation, it is necessary to implement cultural education project to improve farmers’ educational level and cognitive ability; Strengthen publicity, pay more attention to the improvement of farmers’ recognition to farmland consolidation; establishing a transparent farmland consolidation decision-making system and implementing a "sunshine" decision-making project; Further promoting the construction of modern featured agriculture to improve the competitiveness of agricultural products. Improving project efficiency by carrying out farmland consolidation that is suitable to local conditions.