Evaluation of farmers' income effect in immigration regions of ecological resettlement project in Guangxi Province

Abstract: Implementing an environmental resettlement program in ecologically fragile and poverty-stricken areas is believed to be an intervention that is effective at alleviating poverty. It does not merely aim to promote self-reliance to lift people out of poverty, but also to inculcate social responsibility, for example, by easing incongruities in the people-land relationship and by recover environment from degradation in ecological fragile areas. Due to shortage of resources, fragile environment is very serious in Karst area in Southwest China. Since 1990, the country began to implement environmental resettlement program. The aim is to transfer some extremely poor farmers from a particular rocky region where per capita cultivated land is under 0.02 hm2 and basic living conditions are untenable to another area in the province where land resources are relatively abundant. Based on the background, it is necessary to quantitatively evaluate ecological immigrant project on farmers' income contribution, objectively evaluate the implementation effect and obstacle factors of the ecological immigrant project, and to provide policy support and consolidate the achievements of immigration. Based on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), we investigated 30 villages in Guangxi Huangjiang Karst resettlement area for production level and living standard data of peasant households before and after resettlement, and resettled and local people, respectively. After quantitative analysis methods (e.g., Difference-in-Difference) were employed to evaluate the farmer' income effects and sustainability of the project, we concluded that environmental resettlement program relieved the human-land conflict in the eco-fragile region, and enhanced incomes of the resettled households. The farmers' household income through crop production, aquaculture, or wage has significantly improved. However, problems remained, for example, the resettlement household incomes increased more slowly compared with the natives. In addition to the non-agricultural income, impact of environmental resettlement program to other income showed a significant negative effect, immigrant income growth lagged far behind to the natives. Although the average cultivated land area had little effect on total income and net income of the households, average area of paddy field and the proportion of labor was significantly (P < 0.05) and positively correlated to farmers' income growth. To maintain the sustainability of environmental resettlement program, government should combine the implementation of the resettlement with evaluation of the program, and as such government could make a timely adjustment of various policy measures according to the evaluation results. The results indicated that the studied area should advance agricultural structural adjustment, and promote agricultural production efficiency and increase farmers' income by providing working opportunities for immigrants outside of agriculture area. Redistribution of natural resources should be carried out before implementation of environmental resettlement program. Optimal arrangement of the current land system will let the migrants and natives enjoy equal opportunities for resources, and prevent frictions between the immigrant and natives in the competition of the limited resources, increase the sustainability of environmental resettlement program.