Man Yu

China has widely implemented land consolidation, which was expected to increase the amount of cultivated land and enhance grain yields. Key components of land consolidation include filling mall waterbodies and leveling land, both of which have strong impacts on the environment in the Yangtze River Delta. The impacts of land consolidation on soil ecology and agricultural production are not yet clear. Here, we conducted a field survey of soil properties and rice growth to detect the effects of land consolidation in the first growing season. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used to analyze the remote sensing data. We found significant differences in the soil properties under different types of land leveling, with a general NDVI pattern of: control > borrowed topsoil area > filled waterbodies area > topsoil cutting area. We found significant heterogeneity in rice NDVI after land consolidation. The NDVI of rice had extremely significant positive correlations with soil organic matter and available zinc. The spatial variation in soil properties caused by land consolidation was a dominant factor leading to the heterogeneity of rice NDVI. Fertilizing soil and strengthening field management should be adopted to provide more ecological services while increasing quantity.

Since the year 2000, China has implemented large-scale land consolidation, which was used to reduce land fragmentation, enhance grain yield capability, facilitate land tenure transfer, and promote agricultural operational scale. However, the impacts of land consolidation on agricultural technical efficiency of producers in practice is not yet clear. A field survey was executed at two points of time during July 2010 and July 2016. A total of 900 producers were chosen from 30 land consolidation projects at random in the Jiangsu Province. The agricultural technical efficiency caused by land consolidation was calculated by using a stochastic frontier analysis method. The results of a stochastic frontier production function reveal that land tenure transfer, land fragmentation, non-agricultural income, and crop diversity has undergone significant changes after land consolidation. The overall agricultural technical efficiency of producers had also increased considerably and the average technical efficiency was estimated at 0.924 after land consolidation. Land consolidation directly promotes land tenure transfer while indirectly encouraging non-agricultural employment, which could improve agricultural technical efficiency of producers. Non-agricultural income and crop diversity had a significant correlation with agricultural technical efficiency, but land fragmentation after land consolidation does not significantly improve technical efficiency. These conclusions are helpful in understanding the impacts of land consolidation, which enriches the academic literature in related fields and improves the policy of land consolidation in China and other developing countries.

China has made great progress in its economy and urbanization in the past 30 years, but rural development has lagged behind the cities and the gap between urban and rural areas continues to widen. The Chinese government implemented the “Building New Countryside Plan” in 2006, which used a new policy of increasing the urban land quota linked with decreasing rural construction land to promote rural transformation and the coordinated development of the urban–rural area. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of rural transformation caused by comprehensive land consolidation and to improve the future practical operability of the policy, a field survey on 42 projects in Jiangsu Province was conducted from March–August 2016. The results of this study showed that: (1) Comprehensive land consolidation had a significant role in promoting rural transformation based on the premise of excluding the average growth rate and 88.1% of the project’s farmers’ income achieved a faster increase than other areas; (2) the increase in the farmer’s income was mainly attributed to non-agricultural income as non-agricultural employment was still a precondition for rural transformation and the degree of local industrialization and educational levels received by farmers were limited for rural transformation; (3) the transfer fees of the land quota were the key factor to maintain the financial balance between demolition and resettlement, but local land quota demand and government capacity in financial operations affected rural restructuring; and (4) the absence of rural social welfare systems significantly affected the land transfer rate. The above conclusions are helpful in understanding the dynamic mechanism of rural transformation, enriching the academic literature in related fields, and are of practical significance for rural revitalization in developing countries.