Evaluation On Regional Grain Production Superiority And Influencing Factors In China

As the world's most populous agricultural country,China's food security has always been the focus of world attention.Although China has guaranteed the food supply of 1.4 billion people with limited water resources and cultivated land resources,grain production faces constraints such as uneven regional layout,mismatched water-cultivated land resources,and low water use efficiency.The analysis of the characteristics and advantages of regional grain production in China can provide a reference for optimizing the regional grain planting layout,improving resource utilization efficiency,and ensuring grain security.This paper takes 31 provincial-level administrative regions in mainland China as the research area,dividing them into three grain production types of main producing area,main selling area and balanced area according to the characteristics of grain production,and comprehensively evaluates the regional grain production scale advantages,efficiency advantages,and water use efficiency advantage,comprehensive comparative advantage and their spatial and temporal evolution characteristics from 1997 to 2014.The spatial autocorrelation method was used to study the spatial and temporal differences of regional grain production dominance in China,and the path analysis method was used to explore the main factors affecting the dominance of grain production.The main conclusions of the paper are as follows:(1)By analyzing the grain planting area,grain output and grain production water consumption of the three major grain production types and 31 provincial administrative regions,the basic pattern of grain production in China and its characteristics of spatial and temporal evolution are discussed.The total sown area,total yield and total water consumption of the main producing area are higher than those of the other two types of grain production area,of which Heilongjiang and Henan are the most significant.The total planting area and total output of grain crops in the main producing area have been steadily increasing since 2003,while the trend of total water consumption fluctuates greatly;the total sown area of grain crops,total output,and total water consumption fluctuate slightly in the balanced area;the total planting area,total output,and total water consumption are all small and showing a significant downward trend of grain crops in the main selling area represented by the southeast coastal provinces(such as Guangdong,Fujian,etc.)are smaller and show a significant downward trend.(2)Based on the theory of comparative advantage,this paper studies the comparative advantage of regional grain production scale,efficiency,water use efficiency and comprehensive comparative advantage in China.The results show that the main producing area has the advantage of production scale for a long time.The scale advantage degree of the balanced area first increases and then decreases,and the comparative advantage of grain production scale of the main selling area continues to decline;the grain production of the main producing area has a strong efficiency advantage.The grain production of the balanced area has been at a disadvantage in the production efficiency,and the main selling area has a longterm advantage in the grain production efficiency,but the degree of superiority has declined significantly;the main producing area has long-term advantages in water use efficiency of grain production,the balanced area has always been at a disadvantage in water use efficiency comparative advantage,and the main selling area has a further prominent disadvantage in water use efficiency of grain production;while in terms of comprehensive comparative advantage,the main producing area has maintained a comprehensive comparative advantage for a long time,with a large degree of advantage.The balanced area has a long-term disadvantage and tends to be stable in terms of comprehensive comparative advantage,and the comprehensive comparative advantage of the main selling area has declined significantly(3)The spatial autocorrelation characteristics of regional grain production dominance show that the scale dominance of Northeast China and Inner Mongolia is HH(High-High)aggregation,while the southeast coastal area is a cluster of low-scale dominance.The spatial difference of efficiency advantage of each province is large,and there is no obvious spatial correlation between most provinces;there are significant HH accumulations in the water use efficiency advantage and comprehensive comparative advantage in the northeast region and the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain,while LL(Low-Low)aggregation with water use efficiency and comprehensive comparative advantage in some northwest regions of China.(4)Using the path analysis method,the driving factors of the comparative advantage of grain production scale,the comparative advantage of efficiency,and the comparative advantage of water use efficiency were discussed.It was found that the comparative advantage of the scale of grain production and the degree of regional economic development showed a significant negative correlation,that is,the more economically developed area,the smaller the scale of grain production due to the higher proportion of non-agricultural industries in the industrial structure and the lower enthusiasm for grain production;and the increase in temperature and annual precipitation and the increase in agricultural input have a positive effect on the improvement of grain production efficiency.Among them,the increase in effective irrigation rate(the ratio of effective irrigation area to cultivated land area)has the greatest impact on the comparative advantage of grain production efficiency.In view of the severe water use situation in China,it is necessary to improve the efficiency of irrigation water use and promote water-saving agriculture without increasing the total irrigation water consumption;the increase in agricultural input is also an effective measure to improve the comparative advantage of the water use efficiency of grain production,while the use of pesticides and fertilizers will also cause agricultural non-point source pollution,so the use of pesticides and fertilizers should be regulated under the premise of controlling agricultural water pollution.