Construction of the green development indicators for agriculture and its prediction in the 14th Five-Year Plan in China

Abstract: The ever-increasing needs for a better life have proposed much higher requirements for agricultural development, as socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era. The Agricultural Green Development (AGD) has been the re-creation under the Sinicization for the concept of sustainable development. The construction of green development indicators for agriculture can greatly contribute to quantitatively valuating the AGD level, particularly for path exploration and policy-making. Accordingly, this study aims to first construct the evaluation index system of AGD in China. Then, the entropy, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) were applied to calculate the weight value of each indicator. As such, a combination weighting was used to calculate the final comprehensive weight value of each indicator to evaluate the AGD level in China from 2007 to 2019. Finally, a grey Verhulst model was adopted to predict the development trend in the 14th Five-Year Plan. The findings of this study revealed that China's AGD level showed a steady upward trend, and gradually moved towards the path of green development during 2007-2019. The comprehensive index of AGD rose from 26.20 in 2007 to 70.76 in 2019, with an average annual increase of 13.08%. Among them, the comprehensive index of AGD in 2017, 2018, and 2019 increased by 4.5%, 1.8%, and 5.1%, respectively, higher than the average level from 2013 to 2016. This was because, 1) a series of important policies were released to promote the AGD in recent years, including the relevant mechanism for AGD, the national AGD pilot zones, the supporting capacity of science and technology. 2) The agricultural development was oriented towards the path of green development during policy decision-making. More importantly, the weight value of the first-level index "Resource conservation and efficient utilization" was the largest (0.386), and the rest of the three first-level indicators were ranked in descending order "Policy support and science & technology support" (0.223), "Natural resources and ecological security" (0.212) and "High-quality products and affluence" (0.179). 3) China's AGD was predicted to enter the fast lane during the 14th Five-Year Plan, where the comprehensive index of AGD reached 77.9, an increase of 11.67% over 2019. It was also found that there were much larger weight values for the indicators of energy consumption per unit of agricultural output, carbon base productivity, and R&D investment intensity. It inferred that scientific and technological innovation can be an effective way to reduce resource consumption for higher efficient use, which was the power source for AGD. Therefore, three recommendations can be addressed during this time: 1) To further improve the system and mechanism of AGD; 2) To explore diversified agricultural and ecological compensation (e.g., carbon compensation), and 3) to strengthen the tackling of key green technologies (e.g., green technology for higher production and efficiency of crops, green and low-carbon planting and breeding technology). This finding can provide potential decision-making support to promote the AGD for the construction of the evaluation index system.