Large-scale Pig Breeding And Selection In China Under Environmental Regulation

With the rapid economic development and the advancing of people’s living standards,the increasing demand has made the livestock and poultry breeding industry develop rapidly in the past few decades.Corresponding to the fast and prosperous aquaculture industry is the increasing pollution of aquaculture,severe environmental pollution endangers people’s health.In order to hold back the trend of worsening environmental degradation caused by livestock and poultry production,the Chinese government has intensively promulgated a number of environmental regulatory policies and regulations since 2014,trying to adjust the structure of the livestock and poultry breeding industry and optimize the industrial layout.The pig breeding industry,as the most important and the most concerned industry in the livestock and poultry breeding industry,is bound to be greatly affected by strict environmental regulations.Due to the delimitation of restricted breeding areas,220,000 pig farms near major rivers in my country have been closed.In restricted breeding areas,environmental regulations increase the cost of breeding,which is unbearable for small-scale farmers,while large-scale farmers can meet regulatory requirements by investing in environmental protection facilities.In no-breeding areas,farmers can only choose to close the farm or move to other areas to continue breeding.Obviously,environmental regulations have become the most critical factor restricting the development of the pig breeding industry in the country.Research on the structural changes and location dynamics of the pig breeding industry under environmental regulations is conducive to the further implementation of environmental policies and regulations,and can also provide for the future development of the country’s pig breeding.This article takes the implementation of my country’s livestock and poultry environmental regulations as a quasi-natural experiment,based on the manually collected environmental regulation data of 279 prefecture-level cities in my country from 2014 to 2017,and the pig farmers of different scales in 31 provinces(cities)in my country from 2010 to 2017.Farming data and live pig production data in 279prefecture-level cities from 2010 to 2017,using the difference-in-difference model to prove up the impact of the implementation of environmental regulations on the structure and location dynamics of the country’s pig breeding industry.Specifically,this article first uses the collected data to compare and analyze the changes in the scale of pig farming and industrial layout in my country before and after the implementation of environmental regulations,and conduct a comparative analysis by region;secondly,use the double difference model to estimate the impact of environmental regulations on my country The effect of large-scale pig breeding;finally,using the same model to estimate the effect of environmental regulations on the proportion of live pig production in the implementation area,and further using heterogeneity analysis to explore the direction of the transfer of my country’s pig industry under environmental regulations.The research conclusions of this paper are as follows:First,environmental regulations have reduced the proportion of scattered households in the implementation area by 1.9%,the proportion of professional breeding households has increased by 1.3%,the proportion of large-scale farmers has increased by 1.2%,and the effect of environmental regulations on the scale of pig breeding increasing with the increase of the intensity of regulation.It can be said that the implementation of environmental regulations has greatly increased the scale of pig breeding in my country.Second,environmental regulation reduces the distribution of pig production,pig production and stock in regulated areas by 8.2%,8.3% and 10.1%.With the increasing environmental regulation intensity,it plays a more significant role in the transfer out of the pig industry in regulated areas.That is to say,the implementation of environmental regulation will alter the layout of the pig breeding industry.Third,due to a decentralized system of environmental governance and around the breeding pollution situation is different,the implementation of the environmental regulation intensity is also different.Through the analysis of the regional heterogeneity pig-breeding industry is from the south with strong the environmental regulation intensity to areas with weak environmental regulation intensity in the north.At the same time,basing on the economic development level of heterogeneity analysis,results show that the pig farming industry is from the economic developed regions with strong environmental regulation intensity to economic underdeveloped regions with weak intensity of environmental regulation,which may make the environmental regulation is weak areas become a pollution haven.