Abstract

Ever since China carried out the policy of basic farmland protection, the speed of reduction in the amount of cultivated land resources has been alleviated to a certain extent, which indicates that the policy of basic farmland protection has achieved certain effect. However, with elapsing of the time, negative effects of the protection policy also begins to emerge. Taking the data about a field survey in Wuhan as the case study, this article makes a comparison between the income pattern and level of farmers both from basic farmland protection areas and from non-basic farmland protection areas, works out the opportunity cost of farmers’ protection of cultivated land in the protection areas, employs the cost benefit analysis method and gets the following specific conclusions. In terms of planting structure, what farmers from protection areas plant most is food crop, whereas farmers from non-protection areas mostly plant commercial crop. This difference of planting structure leads to imbalance of interests of farmers. In terms of the income level, the proportion of income of farmers in protection areas to the income of farmers in non-protection areas is 1:4.3. Meanwhile, the proportion of income of farmers in protection areas to the income of urban residents is 1:6.25, indicating an extremely obvious interest imbalance.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.