ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Land, Livelihoods and Food Security
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1673265
The Impact of High-Standard Farmland Construction Policy on Disaster Vulnerability of Food Production Systems: Evidence from China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Zhongnan University of Economics and Law School of Business Administration, Wuhan, China
- 2WTO and Hubei Development Research Center, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China
- 3School of Economics, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
High-standard farmland construction (HSFC) plays a vital role in mitigating agricultural natural risks, lessening agricultural disasters, and safeguarding food security. China's 2011-launched HSFC policy creates an ideal quasi-natural experiment. It permits rigorous quantification of farmland consolidation effects on the disaster vulnerability characterizing national food production systems. This study uses provincial panel data from China (2005–2022) and applies the continuous double difference method. It aims to uncover the spatiotemporal characteristics of disaster vulnerability in food production, assess the policy's impact on such vulnerability, and empirically test the potential mediating role of agricultural mechanization, large-scale farming, and improved irrigation. Findings indicate a statistically significant decrease in food production's disaster vulnerability attributable to the policy. This causal effect withstands rigorous validation via sequential robustness checks, including parallel trends assessment, placebo testing, and control cohort respecification. Heterogeneous analysis indicates that the policy is particularly effective in reducing disaster vulnerability in major food - producing areas, dry - land regions, and wheat - growing regions. Mechanism analysis confirms that the policy achieves this effect by enhancing agricultural mechanization, promoting large-scale farming, and improving irrigation. These findings provide actionable empirical foundations for refining HSFC to bolster national food security resilience.
Keywords: High Standard Farmland Construction Policy, Disaster vulnerability, FoodProduction Systems, Food security, Influence mechanism
Received: 25 Jul 2025; Accepted: 07 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wei, Zheng, Zhang, Jiquan, Cui and You. 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: Qingnan You, youqingnan@stu.zuel.edu.cn
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.