Abstract
Addressing the excessive input and inefficient use of agrochemicals are crucial for global food security, environmental protection, and human health. This paper offers a new idea from the perspective of outsourcing agricultural production. The impact of outsourcing on the frequency and intensity of agrochemical inputs were theoretically analyzed and empirically tested using a field survey of 1211 farmers in Heilongjiang, Henan, and Hunan, the major food-producing areas in China. A Logit regression framework was used to analyze the effect, a conditional mixture process (CMP) method was used to address potential endogeneity concerns, and a mediation effect model was used to dissect the mechanism. The results show that the effect of outsourcing on both input frequency and input intensity of agrochemicals was positive at the 1% significance level. The positive effect conclusion still holds even after addressing the potential endogeneity concerns, and in the sub-sample estimates for maize, wheat, and rice. We conclude that outsourcing can improve the utilization efficiency of agrochemicals by increasing the frequency of agrochemical inputs, but fail to solve the excessive agrochemical inputs and even leads to a further increase in the intensity of agrochemical inputs. Moreover, the mechanism for an increase in agrochemical input intensity due to outsourcing was explored, and it is more likely to be caused by inhibiting farmers' investment in soil improvement measures.
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Data availability
The data collected for this study were from a household survey conducted by our project team among farmers in major food producing areas in China in October 2021.
Notes
It is worth noting that “outsourcing agricultural production (OAP)” studied in this paper is very different from the concept of “agricultural outsourcing (AO)” that has recently been hotly studied in the international development literature. AO is an outsourcing arrangement where capita-rich and natural resources-poor countries buy or lease huge quantities of arable lands from capita-poor and resources-rich countries for food or energy. While OAP is a way to help farmers solve their own agricultural production problems that cannot be solved, cannot be solved well, or cannot be solved economical and reasonable by using the market as a medium, using economic means and paying for services, and letting professionals do professional work.
The division of China's main food-producing areas originated from the reform of the food distribution system in 2001. At that time, the Chinese government divided China's 31 provinces into three functional areas: the main food producing area, the balanced production and marketing area and the main marketing area, based on the overall characteristics of food production and consumption in each province and considering the differences in resource endowment and the historical tradition. Among them: there are 13 provinces in the main food producing areas, including Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan and Sichuan.
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Acknowledgements
We extend our gratitude to all our investigators, government departments, and farmers in China who supported this study.
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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos 72173097, 72141006) and a Project funded by the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Supervision was performed by Minjuan Zhao and Hsiaoping Chien. Formal analysis and methodology were performed by Congying Zhang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Qian Chang, and visualization was performed by Wenchao Wu. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Chang, Q., Zhang, C., Chien, H. et al. Impact of outsourcing agricultural production on the frequency and intensity of agrochemical inputs: evidence from a field survey of 1211 farmers in major food-producing areas in China. Environ Dev Sustain 26, 9577–9602 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-03109-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-03109-z