ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Land, Livelihoods and Food Security
This article is part of the Research TopicDynamic Land Use and Socioeconomic-Environmental Interaction Patterns: Bridging Sustainability and DevelopmentView all 20 articles
The Paradox of Policy-Driven Land Change: Rural Cropland Expansion and Grain Production Decline in China
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Economics, Guizhou University, Guiyang, China
- 2School of International Education, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang, China
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Against a backdrop of rapid rural transformation, maintaining the role of traditional villages in safeguarding national food security in China has become an increasingly difficult challenge. Although China's traditional village protection policy (the Policy) includes requirements for cropland protection and specifies ensuring food security as a key goal, its impact on maintaining main grain (MG) output remains uncertain. Using a multiple DID framework, this study evaluates how the Policy influences cropland, main grain land (MGL) and MG output in traditional villages, and explores the mechanisms behind the mismatch between changes in MGL and MG output. The results show that despite significantly expanding cropland, the Policy has not led to simultaneous increases in MGL and MG output. This indicates the reliance on cropland expansion is not having the intended effect; in fact, MG output in traditional villages in China has declined. Interestingly, the magnitude of the policy-driven decline in MG output is far smaller than the decline in MGL. This is due to the fact that technological progress has improved the efficiency of MG production, reducing the potential decline in crop yields caused by the reduction in MGL. This study incorporates the key factors of population, cropland, and grain at the village level into a unified analytical framework to evaluates the effect of village policies that take cropland expansion as a means of increasing MG output. The analysis not only addresses limitations in the existing literature, such as analyzing relevant factors in isolation or the lack of empirical research at the village level, but also provides key micro-level evidence for optimizing food security policies for traditional villages.
Keywords: Food security, village protection policy, land use, Grain output, Demographic change
Received: 27 Sep 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yuan, Li, Lou, Zhong and Cui. 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: Haiyang Cui
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