ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Can Planting Income Insurance Policy Promote a Shift in Planting Structure Towards Staple Grain Crops?
Provisionally accepted
Wenqing Li1*
Yunkun Cai2- 1Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing, China
- 2Nankai University, Tianjin, China
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To ensure food security and stabilise farm household incomes, China has implemented planting income insurance policy (PIIP). However, whether this policy leads to a shift in planting structure towards staple grain crops remains to be verified. In this paper, we use a difference-in-differences (DID) model, drawing on data from the 2020 and 2022 China Land Economy Survey (CLES), to examine the impact of the PIIP on the cultivation structure towards staple grains. The study found that: (1) The implementation of PIIP significantly promoted the adjustment of the planting structure to staple grain. Compared with areas where the policy was not implemented, the implementation of the PIIP led to an average increase of 15.4 percentage points in the proportion of staple grain crops grown by farmers in pilot regions. (2) After subdividing staple grain crops, it was found that the implementation of PIIP increased the proportion of rice, wheat, and maize planting areas in the pilot regions by 4.9, 7.1, and 3.4 percentage points, respectively. (3) The policy encouraged this shift towards staple grain crops by incentivising farmer participation in insurance, increasing agricultural machinery inputs, and expanding operational scale. (4) The impact of PIIP on planting structure differs among household types. The policy demonstrated a more significant effect on the 'staple grain' planting structure of households whose farmland has already been certified, whose agricultural labour endowment is weaker and whose farmland operation scale is larger.
Keywords: Planting Income Insurance Policy, PIIP, Staple Grain Crops, Planting structure, Staggered Difference-in-Differences (DID) Model
Received: 19 Aug 2025; Accepted: 30 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li and Cai. 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: Wenqing Li, 2691981301@qq.com
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