Comparative study of cultivated land use intensive degree and its change law at different economic levels

In the process of industrialization of China, the use of cultivated land has changed obviously, and the use intensive degree is diverse in different areas with different economic development levels. In this study, three typical agricultural regions with different economic levels were chosen to compare and analyze their use intensities of cultivated land during the period of 2000 to 2004. Results show that the order of intensive degree is accordant with the order of economic level which is Daxing > Quzhou > Wuchuan. The positive correlation between cultivated land use intensive degree and GDP is significant, which indicate that the intensive degree increased with the development of economy. At the same time, the internal structure of intensive degree changes with economic growth: the percentage of capital intensity goes up gradually while labor intensity goes down. It reflects the trend that capital input will gradually substitute labor input in the process of regional development. Moreover, planting structures also have close relationships with regional use intensive degree of cultivated land and the intensive degree for planting structure mainly of vegetables is higher than that mainly of field crops.