Intensive Degree and Spatial-Temporal Distributions of Agricultural Land Use over the Huang-Huai-Hai Region of China
黄淮海地区农用地利用集约度及其时空分布

The limitation and scarcity in agricultural land resources require improvement to the intensive utilization level of agriculture land use in order to satisfy the growing agricultural products demand for socio-economic growth in China. Due to shortcomings of calculating the intension degree of agricultural land use by means of material possession and value or market price, the authors introduced a theory of emergy analysis to calculate the intensive degree of agricultural land use over the Huang-Huai-Hai region and then rationally analyzed its spatial-temporal distribution patterns. Because of a prominent natural endowment and good socio-economic conditions for agricultural production, the intensive degree of agricultural production investment over Huang-Huai-Hai region is significantly higher than that of average agricultural production investment in China. Overall, the growth rate of the intensive degree of agricultural production investment is much higher than that of the national average, indicating that the Huang-Huai-Hai region remains a high level of agricultural intensive production. The areas with a decreasing trend in intensive degree of agricultural production are primarily distributed over the regions where the number of migrant workers going out to work is relatively larger and over economically developed regions. The ratio between Agricultural Production Capital and labor input emergy over Huang-Huai-Hai region in period 2001-2005 was significantly higher than that of national average and is growing rapidly. This shows an obvious trend in replacement of the labor power depending on backward hand-tools and livestock by advanced agricultural production tools. It was also found through Spearman rank correlation coefficient analysis that the ratio between Agricultural Production Capital and labor input emergy over Huang-Huai-Hai region is highly correlated to the percentage of the population employed in the primary industrial and the fraction of the unban population to the total population. This indicates that the improvement to the level of agricultural modernization would help presents transfer to the secondary and tertiary industries, free from agricultural labor power.