ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1669981
Pesticide Reduction, Climate Change, and Food Security: Evidence from Rice Production in China
Provisionally accepted
- Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan, China
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The scientific pesticide reduction is important for sustainable agriculture. However, the general public and scholars have been concerned about whether extreme pesticide reduction will lead to a decline in grain yield and thus affect the stability of food security in China. This study attempted to evaluate the dynamic impact of pesticide reduction ratio on rice yield using a threshold regression model based on survey data from 1,120 rice farmers in China. The results show that there is a single threshold effect of the pesticide reduction ratio on rice yield. The threshold value of pesticide reduction of the sample farmers is 33.25%. It suggests that moderate pesticide reduction does not affect rice yield. However, excessive reduction of pesticides is closely linked to diminished pest control effectiveness, which may increase the likelihood of rice yield losses. Furthermore, it can be found that rice pest outbreaks are larger and more frequent under climates such as drought, flooding and high temperature, which could be faced with greater rice yield losses if pesticide use continues to be reduced. It is recommended that policy makers should not be blind and adventurous, but develop scientific and reasonable pesticide reduction plans according to local conditions. Importantly, dynamic and flexible performance assessment targets for pesticide reduction should be set to cope with the impacts brought by extreme climate change.
Keywords: Pesticide reduction, Food security, rice yield, pest management, Climate Change
Received: 21 Jul 2025; Accepted: 08 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Huang, Tang and Shang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lin Tang, 22011003@wit.edu.cn
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