Pedosphere 14(3): 313--321, 2004
ISSN 1002-0160/CN 32-1315/P
©2004 Soil Science Society of China
Published by Elsevier B.V. and Science Press
| Sustainable agriculture evaluation for red soil hill region of southeast China |
ZHAO Qi-Guo1 and XU Meng-Jie2 |
1 Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 71 East Beijing Rd., Nanjing 210008 (China). E-mail: ggzhao@issas.ac.cn
2 Department of Public Management, Nanjing Agricultural University, 1 Weigang Rd., Nanjing 210093 (China) |
| ABSTRACT |
| Agricultural sustainability for economic development is important and a complex issue throughout the world; however, it is difficult to synthetically evaluate its use in the policy making process. The objective of this study was to evaluate sustainable agriculture in the red soil hill region of Southeast China through a newly proposed method combining four separate sub-systems: regional population (P), resource (R), environmental (E), and socio-economic (S). This new index system was proposed to appraise synthetically the agricultural sustainability of the red soil hill region from 1988 to 1996 with a two-step method assessing: a) the agricultural sustainability in each province independently and b) the relative sustainability of each province to the whole region. The first step only provided a development trend for each province based on its original situation, while the second step provided additional information on the comparative status of each province in agricultural development to the region as a whole. Higher index scores were found for the economy and resource categories denoting improvement. However, lower scores in the environment category indicated the improvement was achieved at the cost of deteriorating ecological surroundings due to an increasing population that demanded more from the agro-ecosystem and put heavier pressures on it. Results also showed that water and soil losses in this region were the major obstacles encountered in sustainable agriculture development. The assessment results were verified when compared with results from another method. This suggested that the new assessment system was reliable and credible in evaluating agricultural sustainability on a regional scale. |
| Key Words: agriculture, assessment, red soil hill region, southeast China, sustainability |
| Citation: Zhao, Q. G. and Xu, M. J. 2004. Sustainable agriculture evaluation for red soil hill region of southeast China. Pedosphere. 14(3): 313-321. |
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