Multi-scale Driving Forces Analysis of Agricultural Land Use Change in Taiwan : 1990–2005
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Chu, Chien-Min
Abstract
The loss of agricultural land has become a threat to food security as the food production strongly depends on land resources. What drives agricultural land use change is a complex issue. Globalization and global changes even make this issue more complicated. Different forces, such as global agricultural trade agreement, the adjustment of national agricultural policies, and farmer''s characteristics, have driven the agricultural land use change in Taiwan at different scales.
This research aims to study the driving forces of agricultural land use change and their effects under the recent situation of agriculture trade liberalization by multi-scale approach in Taiwan. In order to conduct a multi-scale analysis, firstly, based on literature review, this research concluded two national agricultural policies, agriculture restructuring and farmland release for development, as the main driving forces at larger scale. Then, the numbers of farmer teams and enterprise units were chosen as the variable surrogates of the two policies, respectively, for the township-scale analysis. Ten variables were also selected to represent farmer behaviors, household conditions and management types at the village scale. Finally, this research applied a hierarchical linear model to analyze and understand these variables’ effects to agricultural land use change at different levels.
The results show that at the village scale, seven factors including the change of farmer-household ratio, age of household director, household population, non-self-owned cultivated land ratio, rice planting ratio, low agricultural income ratio and initial cultivated land area, were significantly related to the change of farmland area in single-scale model. However, in the multi-scale model, only the change of farmer-household ratio, non-self-owned cultivated land ratio, low agricultural income ratio and initial cultivated land area were significantly related to the change of the area. Furthermore, at township scale, the number of farmer teams will increase the change of farmer-household ratio and non-self-owned cultivated land ratio, and consequently influences farmland area change. On the contrary, the number of enterprise units will decrease the change of farmer-household ratio and non-self-owned cultivated land ratio and increase the low agricultural income ration, and then causes a negative feedback to the farmland area change. According to the spatial distribution of residual values, this research revealed that the multi-scale model presents a better ability to explain the driving forces of agricultural land use change, and demonstrate their interactions across different scales.
Subjects
land use change
driving force
hierarchical linear model
Type
thesis
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