Fragmentation Reduction through Farmer-Led Land Transfer and Consolidation? Experiences of Rice Farmers in Wuhan Metropolitan Area, China

Chaozheng Zhang and Danling Chen
Additional contact information
Chaozheng Zhang: College of Public Administration, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China
Danling Chen: College of Public Administration, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China

Agriculture, 2021, vol. 11, issue 7, 1-14

Abstract: Land fragmentation has become a serious obstacle to agricultural production, and land transfer and consolidation are traditionally emphasized as the two most effective solutions to this quandary. To identify the extent of land fragmentation accurately and systematically, this study selected the number of plots, the average size of plots, and the average distance between plots to calculate the land fragmentation index (LFI). Taking the Wuhan metropolitan area as a case study, this study examined the effectiveness of farmer-led land transfer and consolidation on land fragmentation. The main results are as follows: (a) most of the transferred plots and contracted plots were not spatially adjacent, suggesting that the tenants could not merge and consolidate both plots; (b) land transfer caused the LFI to increase by 2.85%, suggesting that land transfer had intensified the degree of land fragmentation to some extent; (c) if the transferred and contracted plots were non-adjacent or adjacent but unmerged and unconsolidated, then the LFI might increase or decrease; (d) if the transferred and contracted plots were spatially adjacent, merged, and consolidated, then the LFI decreased significantly.

Keywords: land transfer; land consolidation; land fragmentation; farmer-led (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/11/7/631/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/11/7/631/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:11:y:2021:i:7:p:631-:d:589462

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().