Does yield gap still matter? Evidence from rice production in China

Zhiqi Sun, Ruifa Hu and Yu Hong ()
Additional contact information
Zhiqi Sun: Beijing Institute of Technology
Ruifa Hu: Beijing Institute of Technology
Yu Hong: Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Haidian District

Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, 2022, vol. 14, issue 3, No 16, 829-840

Abstract: Abstract Narrowing the yield gap is a crucial way to increase grain production without increasing cultivated land to meet the growing demand for food and nutrients. Although estimation of yield gap in major grains (rice, wheat and maize) has been extensively studied at the field and experimental levels in recent decades, hardly any rigorous evidence-based studies have been performed at the farm level for the last decade in China. In this study, we employ production functions to estimate the yield gaps in rice farming and examine the different rice gaps in, e.g., regions and cultivation systems, using data collected from 1,029 farms in China in 2017. The results show that rice yield gap still existed in the surveyed region, although almost all farms had already achieved their potential yield (with a 2% yield gap). Age and distance between homesteads and plot have a negative effect on the yield gap, while household assets play an important role in narrowing the yield gap at the household level. Yield gap also varies considerably among regions, cultivated systems (i.e., early, one-season and late rice) and varieties. Policies aimed at ensuring grain self-sufficiency are suggested to focus more on technological changes to improve the potential yield rather relying on narrowing the yield gap at the household/farm level in rice production.

Keywords: Yield gap; Rice production; Single-double rice; Dichotomized production function; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12571-022-01261-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:ssefpa:v:14:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1007_s12571-022-01261-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ulture/journal/12571

DOI: 10.1007/s12571-022-01261-4

Access Statistics for this article

Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food is currently edited by R.N. Strange

More articles in Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food from Springer, The International Society for Plant Pathology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().