Abstract
Households in China’s Yunnan Province were surveyed to understand the impacts of hydropower development and resettlement on the agricultural livelihoods of rural villagers. Household-level data from this survey are analyzed to test whether income and landholdings vary by resettlement status. Independent sample t-tests and one-way ANOVAs are used to examine how resettlement status relates to income, land allotments, agricultural crops, and government subsides. Results showed that, contrary to predictions, resettlement corresponds to higher household incomes, while differences in landholdings were mixed. Results indicate that while productive landholdings are less for resettled households, new wage labor, government subsidies, and intensified agriculture may contribute to a higher annual mean income at the household level. However, the tradeoff of receiving wage income for reduced landholdings may be a significant vulnerability for the affected households of the Mekong River Basin, since this loss in productive land corresponds to a long-term loss in social security.
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Notes
Large dams are defined by the World Commission on Dams (2000) as any dam over 15 m in height or any dam with 3 million cubic meters of storage capacity.
A nationality (minzu) in China refers to ethnicity. China includes 56 officially recognized nationalities including the majority Han nationality. Yunnan province alone contains 25 of these 56 nationality groups.
The well known Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River is the world’s largest overall dam structure. However Xiaowan and Nuozhadu will actually be even taller.
To understand the variability among responses, we used the standard deviation of household income as a measure of dispersion with respect to the mean (Vaske 2008). All resettlement categories showed a similar level of variability for total income: one standard deviation in each resettlement category varied from the mean by approximately half of the value of the mean. For specific income sources, the standard deviation of household responses was relatively high across each resettlement category; one standard deviation varied from the mean by as much as, or more than, the mean value. A high degree of variability for wage labor among households was common to all resettlement categories. It is unknown to what extent the overall high degree of variability may relate to uneven levels of education, infrastructure, and the sporadic nature of wage labor in the Chinese countryside; in the conclusion we discuss what impacts dam construction may have on wage labor opportunities.
In terms of land allotments, paddy land allocation for resettled households showed the least amount of variability. In contrast, non-resettled households had a standard deviation value that exceeded the mean. Dry land allocation variability follows a similar pattern, where only the households that have been resettled have a standard deviation that is less than the value of the mean. It appears the government may be relatively consistent in how it allocates both paddy and dry land among resettled households. The allocation of forest land also indicates a high degree of variability, however no pattern is observed between the resettlement categories.
Variability among resettlement categories for corn, rice, and walnut income was high; a single standard deviation exceeded the mean response values for all resettlement categories and all crop income sources. Again, the high degree of agricultural income variability was common across all resettlement categories.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to recognize the contributions of all the project personnel, including Desiree Tullos, Aaron T. Wolf, Philip H. Brown, and Darrin Magee. We would also like to thank the following collaborators for their work during data collection and analysis: Shen Suping, Yang Donghui, Hua Wang, Marco Clark, Francis Gassert, Edwin Schmitt and Qianwen Xu. Mark Needham also provided helpful comments on the analyses and “Results” sections. Funding for this research project was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Human and Social Dynamics Research Program (Grant #0826752).
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Galipeau, B.A., Ingman, M. & Tilt, B. Dam-Induced Displacement and Agricultural Livelihoods in China’s Mekong Basin. Hum Ecol 41, 437–446 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-013-9575-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-013-9575-y