The Influencing Factors of Green Production Behavior of Lychee Growers in the Main Lychee Producing Areas of Guangzhou

Abstract

With the acceleration of agricultural modernization, problems such as agricultural nonpoint source pollution and the proliferation of agricultural carbon emissions have become increasingly prominent. In this context, promoting sustainable agricultural development; ensuring national food, resource, and ecological security, and accelerating high-quality agricultural development have become inevitable trends. Promoting the green development of agriculture is one of the core tasks of high-quality agricultural development, and the implementation of green production behavior is the key to promoting the green transformation of agriculture. Farmers are not only the main bodies of agricultural production, but also the main implementers of green production. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to clarify the factors influencing farmers' green production behavior and the relative importance of each influencing factor. Based on the perspective of the entire industry chain and survey data of 360 lychee growers in major lychee-producing areas of Guangzhou City from May to August 2022, this study uses an ordered logistic regression model to explore and analyze the influencing factors of the green production behavior of lychee growers. The importance of these results is then ranked using the random forest model. The organic combination of these two methods overcomes the limitations of a single statistical method. The results show that 1) the age and part-time employment of lychee growers and the lychee planting area significantly negatively affect the implementation of their green production behavior; 2) production safety, environmental, and policy cognition can effectively promote the adoption of lychee growers' green production behaviors; 3) village rules and regulations, increasing green production subsidies, identifying geographical indication product brands, government satisfaction, participating in training and increasing agricultural income all significantly positively affect the lychee growers' green production behavior; and 4) the relative importance of explanatory variables ranks from high to low as follows: policy cognition, formulating village rules and regulations, production safety cognition, identifying geographical indication product brands, environmental cognition, increasing agricultural income, age, the planting area of lychee, participating in training, increasing green production subsidies, government satisfaction, and part-time employment. The four influencing factors are also ranked in order of importance: cognitive characteristics, external environment, family business characteristics, and personal characteristics. Accordingly, this study suggests that the government should first, based on respecting the subjectivity of lychee growers, formulate relevant policies according to local conditions to stimulate the internal power of their sustainable development, stimulate their consciousness, and improve their responsibility toward green production by increasing green production subsidies by realizing the visualization of income and benefits, building a diversified publicity and training system, and other means. A supervision mechanism should be established to standardize the behavior of lychee growers, and measures such as market supervision, village rules, and regulations should be adopted to constrain them. Finally, governments must create an external environment conducive to green development by appropriately expanding the planting scale to reduce the proportion of part-time lychee growers; building a high-quality brand image; promoting cooperation among research institutes, universities, and lychee growers; and comprehensively improving their green production levels.

Keywords

• lychee growers
• green production behavior
• the main lychee producing areas
• guangzhou city