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Estimating effects of cooperative membership on farmers’ safe production behaviors: evidence from the rice sector in China

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Abstract

The current agricultural system in China highly depends on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Consequently, agricultural production activities cause various environmental issues. Carrying out safe production provides vital support for sustainable development of agriculture, which may improve this situation. The past decades have witnessed the fast development of rural cooperatives organization in China. Given the fact that rural cooperative organization plays a crucial role in agricultural production, however, there is little empirical evidence on the relationship between cooperative membership and safe production of smallholders in China. This study aims to investigate whether the participation in farmer cooperatives contributes to safe production in agriculture in China. Using survey data covering 623 rice-producing farm households in Sichuan province in China, this study employs the endogenous switching regression model to examine the effects of the participation in farmer cooperatives on safe production in rice agriculture. The results show that cooperative membership has significantly positive effects on safe production in rice agriculture. In particular, the average treatment effects demonstrate that without the participation in cooperatives, the members’ adoption of the green control techniques would reduce by 74.491%, the application of artificial weeding would reduce by 38.768%, and organic fertilizer input would reduce by 23.448%. Furthermore, the marginal treatment effect is employed to evaluate the heterogeneous effects of the participation in farmer cooperatives on safe production in rice agriculture. Heterogeneous effect analyses suggest that farmers who are more likely to participate in farmer cooperatives are easier to adopt green control technology, while farmers who are less likely to participate in farmer cooperatives are easier to adopt artificial weeding and increase organic fertilizer input. To improve safe production in rice agriculture, the Chinese government is expected to encourage rice farmers to participate in rural cooperative organizations, and to stimulate rice farmers to take collective action to address environment issues arising from agricultural production.

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Notes

  1. There were 2.17 million farmer cooperatives registered with industrial and commercial authorities in China by the end of 2018.(Data source: National Bureau of Statistics of China)

  2. Learning from National Bureau of Statistics of China, by the end of 2018, China had 2.17 million farmers cooperatives, 600,000 family farms and 87,000 leading enterprises of agricultural industrialization.

  3. The ESP model is similar to ESR model in mathematical analysis, so it is not listed in the text due to limited words.

  4. 1 mu is equal to 0.067 ha.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their kind comments and valuable suggestions.

Funding

This study was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China with ratification number 71603177, “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” (2722020JCT003), and the Chinese National Research of Social Sciences (20CJL026).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Economics, Sichuan Agricultural University, Wenjiang District, Chengdu, 611130, Sichuan Province, China

    Houjian Li, Yu Liu & Xuemei Zhao

  2. School of Public Affairs, Chongqing University, Shapingba District, Chongqing, 400044, China

    Lichen Zhang

  3. College of Economics, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, 430074, Hubei Province, China

    Kaihua Yuan

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  1. Houjian Li
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Houjian Li and Kaihua Yuan conceived and designed this research; Yu Liu and Xuemei Zhao drafted the manuscript and prepared figures; Lichen Zhang discussed the results. All authors have read and agreed to the submitted version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Kaihua Yuan.

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The experimental protocol was established, according to the ethical guidelines of the Helsinki Declaration, and was approved by the Human Ethics Committee of Sichuan Agricultural University. Written informed consent was obtained from individual or guardian participants.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 6 MTEs estimation and standard errors of farmers’ GCT adoption
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Table 7 MTEs estimation and standard errors of farmers’ artificial weeding
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Table 8 MTEs estimation and standard errors of farmers’ organic fertilizer input
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Appendix 2

Table 9 PSM quality indicators before and after matching
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Table 10 PSM quality indicators before and after matching
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Table 11 PSM regression results of behavioral difference between members and non-members
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Fig. 5
figure 5

The nearest neighbor matching based on the estimated propensity score

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Fig. 6
figure 6

The kernel matching based on the estimated propensity score

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Li, H., Liu, Y., Zhao, X. et al. Estimating effects of cooperative membership on farmers’ safe production behaviors: evidence from the rice sector in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 25400–25418 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12337-z

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