Dec., 2013
Journal of Resources and Ecology
J. Resour. Ecol. 2013 4 (4) 344-352
DOI:10.5814/j.issn.1674-764x.2013.04.007
www.jorae.cn
Vol.4 No.4
Report
A Review of Farmland Fragmentation in China
LU Xiao1,2, HUANG Xianjin2*, ZHONG Taiyang2, ZHAO Yuntai2,3 and LI Yi2
1 School of Geography and Tourism, Qufu Normal University, Rizhao 276826, China;
2 School of Geographic and Oceanographic Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China;
3 China Institution of Land Surveying and Planning, Beijing 100035, China
Abstract: Here, we describe research on farmland fragmentation using the summary and comparison
analysis approaches. The definition of farmland fragmentation, main research fields and measurement
methods are reviewed. The connotation of farmland fragmentation is clear and has been widely
recognized, but methods for determining fragmentation require further work. Farmland fragmentation
research in China mainly focuses on the causes and its effect on agricultural production, particularly the
negative impacts. The relationship between farmland fragmentation and land consolidation has received
increasing attention; the relationship between farmland fragmentation and land transfer less so. Research
in this area mainly draws on economic research methods, and geographical spatial analyses are absent.
Several suggestions are made, including additional comparative studies across different areas based on
different economic and social backgrounds; strengthening research on the relationship between farmland
fragmentation and the comprehensive regulation of rural land; and adoption of RS and GIS methods.
Key words: farmland fragmentation; agricultural production; farmland transfer; land consolidation
1 Introduction
Farmland fragmentation is a pattern of land use
corresponding to the scale management of land. It is one
of the main problems facing agriculture in many countries,
especially developing countries (Sun and Liu 2010).
The household contract responsibility system launched
in China in the late 1970s has effectively promoted
agricultural production and increased farmers’ income.
However, equal division of farmland has also led to
further farmland segmentation and fragmentation. Though
farmland fragmentation is a prominent feature in traditional
agricultural production in China (Buck 1937), there are
worries it may hinder the improvement of the scale and
efficiency of agricultural production and modernization, and
have a number of negative influences including reducing the
efficiency of agricultural production, wasting the workforce
in rural areas and improving production costs. Against the
background of rapid economic and social development and
the increasingly serious problem of farmland protection,
it has become extremely urgent to understand how to
promote agricultural production and ensure food security
by optimizing farmland use structure and improving land
use efficiency. Therefore this paper sorts out the studies
on farmland fragmentation in the hope of providing some
theoretical reference for promoting sustainable utilization
2 Connotation and quantification of farmland
fragmentation
The connotation of farmland fragmentation is extended in
other countries from the use of farmland. Binns (1950) held
that farmland fragmentation meant that a farm was composed
of many separated and unconnected plots scattered across
a relatively large area. Later, farmland fragmentation was
thought to be several separated plots of different sizes owned
by farmers (King and Burton 1982) or at least two plots of
land run by a farmer (Nguyen et al. 1996). In agricultural
production in China, the most prominent feature of land
use could be described as small farmlands managed by
farmers; farmers manage a large number of small farmland
plots, of which the former is about scale operation of land
and the latter about farmland fragmentation (Li 2006). Socalled farmland fragmentation means that a farmer manages
more than one plot of farmland around his residence, not
Received: 2013-08-05 Accepted: 2013-12-05
Foundation: National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 41301185, 40971104, 41271190, 41101160, 40801063), and Shandong
Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. ZR2013DQ018).
* Corresponding author: HUANG Xianjin. Email: [email protected].
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LU Xiao, et al.: A Review of Farmland Fragmentation in China
connected, but within a certain reasonable distance from one
another (Xu et al. 2007) and in “an inserted, fragmented and
disorganized state because it is hard to connect them into
one and carry out concentrated and scale management of
them under the influence of artificial or natural conditions”
(Sun and Liu 2010).
As can be seen, farmland fragmentation must meet two
necessary conditions at the same time, that is, there are
many plots of farmland not adjacent to one another and such
plots are small. As a study object in economics, farmland
fragmentation must meet several conditions at the same
time, that is, the farmer has many separate plots of land;
the average size of the plots is so small that scale economy
of farmland is yet to be realized; division of the plots has
nothing to do with terrain, and may be combined into one
through swap (Wang and Zhong 2008a). Therefore, the
number of plots managed by each farmer, the average size
of the plots and the distances from the plots to the farmer’s
house are often regarded as three indexes to indicate the
degree of farmland fragmentation. Farmland fragmentation
is not only an agricultural economic phenomenon, but
also a geographic landscape. Some researchers select six
landscape pattern indices (farm size, number of plots,
average plot size, particle-size distribution of plots, spatial
distribution of plots and the shape features of the plot) to
measure the degree of farmland fragmentation (King and
Burton 1982; Bentley 1987; Simons 1988). However, due to
limited data and econometric models, among other factors,
studies have been unable to quantitative analyze all six
indices. King and Burton (1982) built three more convenient
aggregate indexes, namely S, J and I whose expressions are
as follows:
n
∑α
S = 1-
2
i
(1)
i=1
(
n
∑α
i
)
2
i=1
n
∑α
J=
i
i=1
n
∑
(2)
αi
i=1
n
I=
∑α
i=1
n
i
×
1
100
×
∑ω
(3)
where, n stands for the number of plots owned by the
farmer, αi stands for the size of the ith plot, and ω stands for
the distance from one plot to another or from each plot to
the farmer’s house. The values of S and J are somewhere
between 0–1. The larger the value of S, the higher the
degree of farmland fragmentation; the smaller the value of J,
the higher the degree of farmland fragmentation. As we can
see, the three indexes all involve the number of plots and
the size of each plot, but one cannot tell whether the result
is influenced by the number of plots or the size of each plot.
Moreover, the description of distance by index I is relatively
vague. The distance between every two plots and that from
a plot to the farmer’s house could be both involved in the
model, yet it is hard to determine their role (Li 2006; Wang
2008).
The discussion of the connotation of farmland
fragmentation from the angle of economics at the micro
scale has become very explicit and widely recognized
by researchers. However, given the difficulty in getting
access to data, the number of plots owned by the farmer,
the average size of each plot, the distance from the plot to
the farmer’s house or index S are adopted in most existing
empirical analyses to measure the degree of farmland
fragmentation and explore its influences on agricultural
production. As a landscape of land use, studies of farmland
fragmentation from the angle of landscape ecology remain
rare. Sun Yan, by borrowing ideas from the field of land
patterns, adopted landscape pattern indexes and cluster
analyses to study the fragmented use of land in counties
and towns based on land use vectors interpreted by remote
images in Fenyi County at the meso-scale (Sun and Zhao
2010). Shen et al. (2012) improved the measurement
of farmland fragmentation from the angle of farmland
integrity, and expanded the study angles and fields of
farmland fragmentation. However, it is a new problem
that deserves attention to combine these study scales and
methods with economic studies on farmland fragmentation.
3 Studies of farmland fragmentation
3.1 Causes of farmland fragmentation
Farmland fragmentation in China is the result of rational
choices. It appears under the joint action of politics, the
economy, technologies, institutions, population, productive
forces and the geographic environment (Zhou and Wang
2008). Taking into consideration many research results
on farmland fragmentation, we can see in Table 1 that
centralized and scale management of farmland appeared
in China from the late 1950s to the late 1970s due to the
then special political reason, apart from that farmland in
China has always been fragmented and comprised regional
differences. Xu et al. (2007) adopted data in the farmers’
grain survey database built together by the Chinese
Economies Research Center at the University of Adelaide,
Australia and the Department of Policy and Legal Affairs
of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and found that the
average number of plots owned by each farmer in Jilin,
Sichuan, Jiangxi and Shandong was 4.35, 5.26, 5.10 and
4.95, respectively, in the four years 1993, 1995, 1999 and
2000.
Causes for farmland fragmentation can be generalized
into natural factors and economic and social factors. Natural
factors include terrain conditions (Li 2006), scarcity of
farmland resources, uneven farmland quality (Sklenicka
and Salek 2008) and frequent natural disaster. Of which,
fragmented farmland caused by terrain conditions and
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Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.4, 2013
Table 1 Comparison of farm land fragmentation in different periods in China.
Location
Ding County in Hebei Province (Now is Dingzhou City)1)
China2)
China3)
Qingzhou, Longkou, Xintai in Shandong Province4)
Yong County, Wenling, Jiangshan in Zhejiang Province4)
China5)
Xinghua City in Jiangsu Province6)
Bin County in Heilongjiang Province6)
Nanjing City in Jiangsu Province7)
Suyu District of Suqian City in Jiangsu Province8)
Changtu County in Liaoning Province9)
Kenli County in Shandong Province8)
Average plot Average number of
size (ha)
plots per household
Year
1928
1929–1933
1984–1985
2000
2000
2003
2006
2006
2007
2008
2009
2011
0.28
0.38
–
0.045
0.08
0.087
0.13
0.23
0.096
0.092
0.19
0.23
7.635
5.60
9.70
6.07
4.50
5.72
3.00
4.00
3.68
3.16
3.54
9.24
Average land area per
farm household (ha)
–
2.10
0.62
–
–
0.501
0.34
1.41
0.35
0.29
0.70
1.70
Note: 1) Calculated by Zhou and Wang (2008) based on data in “General Social Survey of Ding County (Li 2005)”; 2) Survey data of 22 provinces in
China from John L. Buck during 1929–1933 (Zhao 2003); 3) National census data during 1984–1985 (Li 2006); 4) Field sampling survey data conducted
by Tian et al. in 2000 (Tian et al. 2005); 5) Office of Rural Fixed Investigation attached to Ministry of Agriculture of the People’s Republic of China in
2003 (Li and Zhong 2006); 6) Sampling survey data conducted by Wang et al. in 2006 (Wang 2008); 7) Sampling survey data conducted by Liu et al. in
2007 (Liu et al. 2008); 8) Sampling survey data conducted by the authors in 2009 and 2011 (Lu et al. 2012); 9) Survey data of a village conducted by Li
et al. in 2009 (Li et al. 2010).
natural disasters is more often, and usually hard to avoid,
and the root cause for farmland fragmentation is the human
(more)-land (less) relationship resulting from the scarcity
of farmland resources, the uneven distribution of farmland
and the huge Chinese population (Li et al. 2006; Chen
and Chen 2011). Besides, traditional egalitarianism, the
inheritance ideas, reducing family sizes, changes in the
functions of farmland and the farmland property rights
system are the social and institutional causes for farmland
fragmentation (Li 2006; Li et al. 2006; Wang 2008; Zhou
and Wang 2008; Sklenicka and Salek 2008). Explanations
of the causes of farmland fragmentation are, theoretically,
made in the aspects of supply and demand (Bentley 1987;
Blare et al. 1992). The former regards fragmentation
as an exogenous variable of farmers like relative land
scarcity caused by the inheritance system and population
pressure, the dissolution of jointly-owned property right;
the latter regards fragmentation as a selected variable of
farmers and assumes that private benefits from farmland
fragmentation outweigh costs (Blare et al. 1992; Fenoaltea
1976). Farmland fragmentation in China is caused by
supply and demand, of which the former arises from the
implementation of the household contract responsibility
system; and the latter is mainly because of the adoption
of dividing farmland equally by population according
to the quality of the farmland and the distance between
the plot and the house (Tan et al. 2003). Ye et al. (2008)
studied the issue historically and found that the existence
of farmland fragmentation had nothing to do with whether
land was privately or publicly owned, but its emergence
was closely linked to the extremely high human-land
ratio, the traditional system of equally divided properties
for each family son and the nature of investment in land,
and was directly influenced by agricultural production
and management methods. Xu et al. (2008) discussed the
causes for farmland fragmentation from two angles, that is,
history and reality, and held that the reappearance of land
fragmentation since China’s reform and opening up was
the direct consequence of the existing land system in rural
China (household contract responsibility system), where
family is the most basic production unit, adopted after the
collapse of the people’s communes featured by collective
scale production. Wang (2010) held that, in the evolution of
the agricultural economic operational mechanism where the
allocation of basic means developed gradually from planned
to market-oriented, the equilibrium state of part-time
farming by the rural labor force, land fragmentation and
limited capital input had become the existing background
for allocating the factors of agricultural production. Parttime farming, as an important factor, directly determined
the fragmentation of land factors and the mode of allocation
of limited input of capital elements. Of course, under the
household contract responsibility system, there should be
a process of interaction between part-time farming and
farmland fragmentation. However, farmland fragmentation
has obviously become the result of the joint action of the
external system and market mechanisms.
Farmland fragmentation in China has been influenced
by many factors, including natural, economic and social
factors. Seen from the established literature, except Tan et
al. (2003) who, using farming household survey data, made
econometric analyses of the causes for and influencing
factors of farmland fragmentation at the level of villages
and farmers, few studies on the causes for farmland
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LU Xiao, et al.: A Review of Farmland Fragmentation in China
fragmentation are empirical, and most are theoretical
discussions based on empirical analyses.
3.2 Influences of farmland fragmentation on agricultural
production
According to studies abroad, the influence of farmland
fragmentation on agricultural production is somewhat
complicated. Bentley (1987), and Blare et al. (1992) held
that, under certain conditions like high risks in agricultural
production, a high human-land ratio and a surplus labor
force, farmland fragmentation benefited diversified
production and operation, and may decentralize agricultural
production risks and make full use of labor resources.
Fenoaltea (1976) held that farmland fragmentation could
alleviate the undersupply of labor if a perfect labor force
market did not exist in seasons when agricultural operations
were in bad need of one. Falco et al. (2010) found after
investigating farms in Bulgaria that the influence of
farmland fragmentation were two-sided: it hinders the
improvement of agricultural productivity, yet influences
diversified planting positively which then promotes the
improvement of farm profits. Hristov (2009) found after
investigating and studying specialized farms in vegetable
and fruit planting in Macedonia that farmland fragmentation
had negative influences on both the output and the profit
of farms. The findings of Sherlund’s study on the situation
in Côte d’Ivoire show that increasing the number of plots
helps improve rice yield, whereas empirical studies in
Pakistan and Bangladesh show the opposite (Sherlund et
al. 2002; Wadud and White 2000; Parikh and Shah 1994).
As can be seen, the influences of farmland fragmentation
on agricultural production are relatively complicated, that
farmland fragmentation may have disparate influences
in different regions with different economic and social
conditions. Relevant studies on the influences of farmland
fragmentation in agricultural production in China have
become increasingly diversified along with the highlight of
the problem of farmland fragmentation since reform and
opening up. This review generalizes the rationality and
negative effects of farmland fragmentation.
3.2.1 Rationality of farmland fragmentation
Like representative opinions abroad, Li et al. (2007)
econometrically analyzed survey data from 394 farming
households in economically underdeveloped areas in
Jiangsu province, and found that farmers’ willingness to
connect fragmented farmland plots and the number of labor
force in their family were negatively relevant, meaning
that the greater the labor force in a farming household, the
more unwilling the family would be to make fragmented
plots a whole. This demonstrates the rationality of farmland
fragmentation in diversified planting, decentralization of
time in agricultural work and full utilization of the labor
force.
Many empirical studies in China have demonstrated
that the rationality of farmland fragmentation in China is
also reflected by the increase in farmers’ income. Li and
Zhong (2006) took the economically underdeveloped areas
in Jiangsu as examples and used the econometric model to
analyze the relationship among farmland fragmentation,
utilization of labor force and farmers’ income. Results
showed that under certain conditions like a high humanland ratio and a surplus labor force in rural areas, farmland
fragmentation helped framers to carry out diversified
planting, rationally allocate and fully utilize the rural labor
force so as to maintain or increase their net income from
planting. Xu et al. (2007) found that the number of plots
owned by farmers and their total income are positively
relevant. However, Xu et al. (2008) adopted the regression
equation-based Shapley value decomposition to estimate
survey data on farmers in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1999 and
2000, only to find that farmland fragmentation, though with
insignificant influences, did narrow the degree of inequality
in farmers’ income in 1995, 1999 and 2000. After an
econometric analysis of questionnaire data from hilly areas
in Hubei province, Wu et al. (2008) found that farmland
fragmentation decentralized the farmers’ risks in production
input, but increased the aggregate input in agriculture.
3.2.2 Negative effects of farmland fragmentation
As has been shown in empirical analyses, because of the
large number of ridges, farmland fragmentation not only
wastes arable land resources, but also hinders the adoption
of large agricultural devices and equipment, increases the
costs of farmland infrastructure, and reduces the scale
effect of agriculture. Many quantitative studies have been
done on the negative effects of farmland fragmentation
in China from its influences on the economies of scale,
grain productivity and costs of production. Fleisher et al.
(1992) used survey data during 1987–1988 to estimate the
grain production function, and found that if the number of
plots in the samples was reduced from 4 to 1, total factor
productivity would increase by 8%. Nguyen et al. (1996)
used data on the survey of farmers in Jilin, Shandong,
Jiangxi, Sichuan and Guangdong during 1993–1994 in
their research and found that the average plot size and the
yield of corn, wheat and rice were significantly positively
relevant, indicating that farmland fragmentation in China
would lead to a reduction in grain yield and increase the
economic costs of agricultural production. Wan and Cheng
(1996; 2001) adopted the same batch of survey data to
involve the number of plots owned by farmers in the
production function of grain crops (rice, wheat, corn and
tuber crops) and found that land plots influenced grain yield
negatively and that land fragmentation affected economies
of scale in crop production and seriously influenced grain
yield in China. They also found that one plot more would
reduce the yield of tuber crops by 9.8%, that of wheat by
6.5%, and that of other crops by 2% or less, and that if
farmland fragmentation could be eliminated; grain yield
in China would be increased by 71.4 million tons each
year. Zhang and Zhuo (2008) adopted data from fixed
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Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.4, 2013
observation points around Hebei in 2004 and showed that
farmland fragmentation had not only reduced the effect
of the economies of scale of corn and wheat production
in Hebei, but also influenced their yield. Su and Wang
(2002) constructed a grain production function using farmer
surveys in Laixi City, Shandong, and found that farmland
fragmentation represented by the number of plots had a
negative influence on the effect of the economies of scale
of grain production in China. However, they obviously
reduced the technical efficiency of agricultural production
and forecasted that per unit area yield of grain would be
increased significantly after farmland consolidation. Wang
and Su (2002) used the same batch of data and adopted
grouping contrast, factor analysis and cluster analysis to
study the relationship between farmland fragmentation
and agricultural production, and found that farmland
fragmentation increased the mechanical costs of machines,
reduced labor productivity, land productivity and the
cost output rate in grain production. Tian et al. (2005)
showed that, in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong, even if
decentralization of risks and alleviation of undersupplied
labor force were taken into consideration, arable land
fragmentation caused by equal division of land had gone
beyond what was needed by farmers, causing efficiency
loss. Tan et al. (2006) used the advanced production
function and the normality Tobit model under examination
to analyze data on farmers and plots in three villages in
Jiangxi province in 2000, and thought that the degree of land
fragmentation was an important factor to explain different
technical efficiencies among farmers, and that increasing
the average size of the plots under the circumstance of other
conditions being unchanged could significantly improve
technical efficiency. Liu et al. (2008) farmer survey data
in 2007 and found that index S standing for farmland
fragmentation had a significant negative influence on multicrop indexes and an increase in the average land composite
output rate. Li et al. (2011), with the help of a DEA model
and regression analysis, found that fragmentation had a
negative influence on the scale efficiency of arable land use
and pure technical efficiency.
Farmland fragmentation should have negatively
influence the mechanized and modernized development of
agriculture, yet quantitative research on this is rare. Hou
(2009) found that farmland fragmentation did not have a
negative influence on the mechanization of agriculture,
which was opposite to the theoretical anticipation. This
may be because he used the per capita arable land scale of
agricultural practitioners as the indicator to characterize
fragmentation, yet the per capita arable land scale of
agricultural practitioners cannot accurately represent the
meaning of farmland fragmentation.
There have been abundant studies into the positive
and negative influences of farmland fragmentation on
agricultural production. See Table 2 for more details.
Most of the existing research has used farmer survey
data, the production function, regression analysis and
other econometric models and use the number of plots or
the average plot size as indexes to characterize farmland
fragmentation and analyze grain production. The research
methods and the selection of indexes need to be further
enriched and improved. For example, Tan et al. (2008)
used regression analyses and the index S to represent the
degree of farmland fragmentation therein to study the
influences of farmland fragmentation on the cost of rice
production in China, and the research results showed that
farmland fragmentation did not influence the total cost of
per unit output, reflecting the complexity of the research
into farmland fragmentation and the necessity to further
innovate research methods and indexes. In the meantime,
the research angles and content of farmland fragmentation
require further expansion. For example, only grain
crops like wheat, corn and rice have been analyzed, and
vegetables, oil producers and other economic crops, the
seeded area of which accounts for 1/3 of the total seeded
area of crops, have been largely ignored. More attention
abroad is paid to fragmentation of forest and pastureland
caused by land fragmentation, and research of this type is
lacking in China. Besides, current empirical studies are
Table 2 Impact of farmland fragmentation on agricultural production.
Short-term
effects
Long-term
effects
Possible positive influences of farmland fragmentation
Private perspective
Public perspective
Decentralization of natural
Equality; stability
or market risks; diversified
and flexible planting; full
use of labor force
Possible negative influences of farmland fragmentation
Private perspective
Public perspective
Increase in the input in planting;
Occupation of more human
increase in the border and waste
resources; increase in the
of land; poor accessibility and
cost of land transfer
waste of time
More flexible inheritance of
land; relatively convenient
purchase, selling and lease
of small size plots
More disputes against the
allocation of landownership and
land use right; difficulty in the
supply of irrigation and other
infrastructure; hard operation
of large machines; possible
difficulty in the dissemination of
new technologies
Increase in biodiversity;
prevention of largescale; spread of plant
diseases and insect pests
Hindrance of the process of
agricultural mechanization;
harder implementation of
the land use planning; harder
implementation of largescale and professional;
hindrance of the progresses
of agricultural technologies
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LU Xiao, et al.: A Review of Farmland Fragmentation in China
only done within local areas, thus lack contrastive analyses
on different economic and social conditions and against
different resource backgrounds.
3.3 Farmland fragmentation and farmland transfer
Farmland fragmentation reduces the scale productivity of
agriculture, so the demand for expanding the operation
scale of farmland has, to some extent, contributed to the
emergence of the rural land market (Huang et al. 2001).
However, lowering the degree of farmland fragmentation
by allocating land resources via the rural land market is
treated differently by scholars. According to Wen (2001),
within the current urban-rural dual economic structure
in China, supply and price fluctuations in the market for
agricultural products do not follow any rules so that farmers
tend to pursue part-time farming which is more secure, and
that has made the scale of agricultural operation further
‘fragmented’. Yet his explanation is only theoretical. Tan
et al. (2003) studied data on fixed observation points in 40
villages in Guangxi, Hubei and Jiangxi in 1999 and found
that development of the farmland market at the village level
did not influence arable land fragmentation. Tian et al.
(2005) analyzed farmer survey data in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and
Shandong in 2000 and found that under the influence of the
farmland market, the degree of arable land fragmentation
was reduced and that the larger the size of the arable land
leased by farmers, the longer the lease period and the
smaller the average size of arable land plots. They also
pointed out that spontaneous trading of farmland among
farmers, being expensive, short-termed and not bound by a
formal contract, was hard to promote land concentration and
scale operation, thus was not statistically significant to the
reduction of arable land fragmentation. The intervention of
the village collective into the farmland market would lower
the transaction costs and effectively promote a centralized
and scale operation of land, and then effectively lower the
degree of arable land fragmentation (Tian et al. 2005).
Wang and Zhong (2008a) conducted a systematic analysis
of the relationship between the farmland transfer market
and farmland fragmentation. To start with, they made a
theoretical analysis based on the fact that China boasted a
large population on tiny land, and proposed that farmland
at the current stage was irreplaceable, secured employment,
and was hard to be divided, which then made the cost of
land transaction far higher than the economies of scale of
plot and made it difficult to consolidate plots via the market.
Wang and Zhong (2008b) investigated farmers in Xinghua
City, Jiangsu province and Bin County in Heilongjiang
province in 2007, and found that because land provides for
well secured employment, it was impossible that a longterm lease of land among farmers would appear at a large
scale, and short-term leases functioned little to reduce land
fragmentation. According to their cluster sampling survey
data and model of land swap among farmers to reduce
farmland fragmentation, land swap among the farmers
seldom succeeded (Zhong and Wang 2010). They also
summarized that only by reducing the population of farmers
by a wide margin and achieving permanent migration of
rural residents to cities could it be possible to gradually
change the nature of land as employment security and
prepare the necessary conditions for the marketization of
land for agricultural purposes (Wang 2008).
As can be seen from theoretical analyses and empirical
studies, farmland transfer and farmland fragmentation
are closely related. Hence the lift of the urban-rural dual
economic structure, a perfect rural society security system
and smooth channels to transfer the rural labor force would
be effective ways to solve farmland fragmentation and
allocate resources via the farmland transfer market. Studies
in China should now provide pragmatic policy suggestions
in combination with the reality of its social and economic
development.
3.4 Farmland fragmentation and rural land
consolidation
As an important handle and a new platform for the
building of a new socialist countryside and the integrated
development of urban and rural areas, integrated rural
land consolidation is now being launched vigorously in
China. Theoretically, it helps fully explore the reclamation
potential of rural land, increase the area of effective arable
land, ameliorate the quality of arable land, and promote the
scale use of land. Farmland consolidation and reclamation
of rural residential areas may function positively in solving
the problem of farmland fragmentation.
Farmland consolidation, on the basis of scientific
planning and design and with the adjustment of land
ownership is conducive to form new-type allocation
of agricultural production featured by “square plots,
framework-like roads, lined trees and network-like trenches”
(Gu 2010). Therefore, land consolidation becomes an
effective means to change land fragmentation and advance
social and economic development in the rural areas (Yang et
al. 2004). However, after an econometric analysis of farmer
questionnaire-based data, Wu et al. (2005) found that land
consolidation in the integrated development of agriculture
in China did not lower the level of farmland fragmentation.
Although their sample of 227 households seems limited, the
findings were of referential significance for how to adjust
the policy goals of land consolidation. Besides, Wang and
Chen (2008) made investigations in Jiangdu City of Jiangsu
and found that when farmers expressed the willingness to
live together and income from other sources became the
main source of income, the implementation of the project of
concentrated residences for farmers would greatly alleviate
farmland fragmentation. This is because most farmers
willing to live in a concentrated way support the overall
management of their land by the collective, which, to
some extent, lowers the degree of farmland fragmentation.
Further, theoretically, farmers living in a concentrated way
could effectively advance the reclamation of a large number
of idle rural residential areas and create great conditions for
350
achieving the overall management of many plots into one
and alleviating farmland fragmentation.
However, the adjustment of land ownership under special
conditions is more important for lowering the degree
of farmland fragmentation and current stage integrated
rural land consolidation plays a prominent role only in
bettering land through natural conditions. Its contribution
to alleviating farmland fragmentation need to be further
studied by combining social and economic reforms in rural
areas and farmland ownership adjustment means, which
is another topic in the study of farmland fragmentation in
China.
4 Methods of studying farmland fragmentation
The main methods of studying the problem of farmland
fragmentation include:
(1) Literature and logic reasoning (Fenoaltea 1976;
Zhou and Wang 2008): reading a great deal of historical
material to collect information valuable to the research, and
conducting logic reasoning based on relevant theories.
(2) Field research and statistical analyses (Buck 1937;
Sherlund et al. 2002; Falco 2010): collecting first-hand data
in the field, and through statistical description, verifying
relevant theoretical reasoning.
(3) Econometric models: using econometric models such
as linear regression (Blare et al. 1992; Wan and Cheng
1996; Zhang and Zhou 2008; Tan et al. 2008; Hristov
2009), C-D production function (Wadud and White 2000;
Wan and Cheng 2001; Li and Zhong 2006; Li et al. 2007)
and the Shapley value equation (Xu et al. 2008) on the basis
of empirical data.
On the whole, different research calls for different
research methods. However, studies on farmland
fragmentation involve mainly economic research methods,
and are basically done by combining qualitative and
quantitative analyses. Some scholars have used exploratory
spatial data analysis (ESDA) and cluster analysis to
discuss the spatial concentration pattern of arable land
fragmentation, the spatial coupling of social and economic
indexes and arable land fragmentation indexes (Chen et
al. 2012; Tian et al. 2013). However, geospatial analyses
and landscape ecology methods are lacking from studies of
farmland fragmentation.
5 Main features and messages
Studies of farmland fragmentation in China have the
following characteristics. (i) The connotation of farmland
fragmentation has been made clear and widely recognized,
yet the methods of measuring the degree of farmland
fragmentation need to be developed. (ii) Present studies
on farmland fragmentation in China are mainly about its
influence on agricultural production, especially negative
influences. (iii) The relationship between farmland
fragmentation, farmland transfer and land consolidation has
attracted much attention, yet current studies mainly focus
on the alleviation of farmland fragmentation by farmland
Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.4, 2013
transfer, and few on the role played by land consolidation
in farmland fragmentation. And (iv) studies of farmland
fragmentation mainly involve economic research methods
and less one has yet discussed the problem of farmland
fragmentation using geospatial analysis or methods from
landscape ecology.
Though the established studies have extensively
discussed the problem of farmland fragmentation in China,
the following themes need to be better developed. (i)
Making comparative studies of farmland fragmentation
under different economic and social conditions and against
different backgrounds in different regions on the existing
basis, or analyzing the problem of farmland fragmentation in
the same region at different stages over time may be helpful
for revealing the mechanism of farmland fragmentation and
finding ways to alleviate farmland fragmentation. (ii) It is
worth discussing the influences of rural land consolidation
on farmland fragmentation in combination with rural
social and economic restructuring. And (iii) studying the
problem of farmland fragmentation by adopting geographic,
landscape ecology, land use/vegetation change knowledge
and other subjects, content and methods.
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Journal of Resources and Ecology Vol.4 No.4, 2013
中国农地细碎化问题研究进展
吕 晓1,2，黄贤金2，钟太洋2，赵雲泰2,3，李 禕2
1 曲阜师范大学地理与旅游学院，日照 276826；
2 南京大学地理与海洋科学学院，南京 210093；
3 中国土地勘测规划院，北京 100035
摘 要：为掌握中国农地细碎化问题研究进展，本文采用概括和比较分析的手段，从农地细碎化的概念内涵、主要研究内
容、研究方法等方面对农地细碎化研究进行梳理和概括。归纳出已有研究的几个特点：①农地细碎化的内涵较为清晰且已经得
到了广泛认可，但对细碎化程度的衡量方法还需进一步深入；②目前的中国农地细碎化研究主要集中在细碎化成因及其对农业
生产的影响方面，以其负面影响的研究最为丰富；③农地细碎化与农地流转、土地整理的关系引起了研究的重视，但是目前主
要集中于农地流转对减轻细碎化程度的探讨，土地整理对细碎化作用的研究十分缺乏；④农地细碎化研究涉及的主要是回归分
析、生产函数模型等经济学研究方法，利用地理空间分析和景观生态学方法探讨农地细碎化问题的研究有待进一步深入。最后
探讨了还需要进一步深入研究的内容。
关键词：农地细碎化；农业生产；农地流转；土地整治