Property rights and fertilizing practices in rural China: Evidence from Northern Jiangsu

Abstract

The premise that the changing economic environment has Chinese farm households more carefully allocating their labor does not mean they no longer fertilize their contracted plots with organic nutrients. Our study of 135 farm households in five Chinese village communities shows that the allegation of farmers neglecting to preserve the soil fertility of their contracted plots is wholly unfounded. Farmers still accumulate organic fertilizer from a number of sources, although not to the same extent as before. With less organic fertilizer at their disposal, farmers carefully ration its use, with the specific criterion of rationing patterned on a number of village characteristics. These factors range from the relative importance of off-farm income and therefore time opportunity costs to farm size, as well as the availability of organic fertilizer supply that can be obtained from complementary farming activities, most notably animal husbandry. Our study suggests that farmers' fertilizing practices are far more complicated than can be adequately explained with a simple property rights theory. In the next section, we discuss how we expected certain village characteristics to affect farmers' fertilizing practices. We then provide evidence regarding farmers' subjective perception of land reallocations or tenure insecurity, on one hand, and fertilizing practices, on the other hand. We discuss the implications of an increase in the supply availability of chemical fertilizer after the reform and the rising non-agricultural economy on fertilizing practices, and then we examine the specific rationale by which farmers in these five villages fertilize their contracted plots.