Exploring differentiated improvement strategies of cultivated land quality in China

Highlights

● Cultivated land quality can be considered in four dimensions: suitability, contiguity, resistance, and ecological stress.

● China’s future goals for construct cultivated land quality include four aspects: promoting the sustainable use of resources, improving the economic benefits of farming, coping with extreme meteorological disasters and meeting the transition of the food system.

● In the future, China should create three major food production spaces: high-standard, low- to medium-yield, and marginal cultivated land.

● Paths for improving cultivated land quality in the three major food production spaces were developed.

Abstract

Quality is the core feature of cultivated land. In the face of deteriorating cultivated land quality and growing food demand, improving cultivated land quality is a top priority for guaranteeing the sustainable use of resources and national food security. Cultivated land quality in the new era can be considered in four dimensions: suitability, contiguity, resistance and ecological stress. Cultivated land suitability in China shows a decreasing trend from east to west, cultivated land contiguity is high in the north-east and low in the south-west. In terms of cultivated land resistance, the number of strongly and weakly resistant cropping fields is small and spatially clustered. Cultivated land with ecological stress is mainly located in the northern region. Based on the current situation of cultivated land quality and the strategic needs of national high-quality development, China’s future goals for improving cultivated land quality include four aspects: promoting the sustainable use of resources, improving the economic benefits of farming, coping with extreme meteorological disasters and meeting the transition of the food system. Against the backdrop of a volatile international environment and high domestic demand for food, China should guarantee a safe supply of staples, a stable supply of animal feed and a moderate supply of high-nutrient food. In the future, China should create three major food production spaces: high-standard, low- to medium-yield, and marginal cultivated land. China urgently needs to construct three paths to implement the goal of improving cultivated land quality, namely the development of high-standard cultivated land with the core of spatial optimization, resilience enhancement and scale coupling, the transformation of low- to medium-yield cultivated land with the core of obstacle elimination, tenure adjustment, ecological sustainable, and the conservation development of marginal cultivated land with a focus on sustainable use.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

China / cultivated land quality / differentiated improvement / food security

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China (19ZDA096) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (42171289).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Wenguang Chen, Xiangbin Kong, and Yubo Liao declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2023. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)