TRANSFORMATION OF AGRICULTURE ON THE LOESS PLATEAU OF CHINA TOWARD GREEN DEVELOPMENT

Highlights

● Agriculture on Loess Plateau has transformed from food shortage to green development.

● Terracing and check-dams are the key engineering measures to increase crop yields.

● Agronomic measures and policy support greatly increased crop production.

● Increasing non-agricultural income is a key part of increasing farmers’ income.

● Grain for Green Program had an overwhelming advantage in protecting environment.

Abstract

Loess Plateau of China is a typical dryland agricultural area. Agriculture there has transformed from food shortage toward green development over the past seven decades, and has achieved world-renowned achievements. During 1950–1980, the population increased from 42 to 77 million, increasing grain production to meet food demand of rapid population growth was the greatest challenge. Engineering measures such as terracing and check-dam were the crucial strategies to increase crop production. From 1981 to 2000, most of agronomic measures played a key role in increasing crops yield, and a series of policy support has benefited millions of smallholders. As expected, these measures and policies greatly increased crop production and basically achieved food security; but, low per capita GDP (only about 620 USD in 2000) was still a big challenge. During 2001–2015, the increase in agricultural and non-agricultural income together supported the increase in farmer income to 5781 USD·yr^–1. Intensive agriculture that relies heavily on chemicals increased crop productivity by 56%. Steadfast policy support such as “Grain for Green Program” had an overwhelming advantage in protecting the natural ecological environment. In the new era, the integration of science and technology innovations, policy support and positive societal factors will be the golden key to further improve food production, protect environment, and increase smallholder income.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

agronomic technologies / economic returns / education / environmental cost / food production / government policy

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31902120), Science and Technology Plan Project of Qinghai Province (2019-NK-A11-02), and Fundamental Research Funds for Central University (Northwest A&F University, 2452018110).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Gang He, Zhaohui Wang, Jianbo Shen, Zhenling Cui, and Fusuo Zhang declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any study with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2021. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)