Betting on the Big: State-Brokered Land Transfers, Large-Scale Agricultural Producers, and Rural Policy Implementation

Abstract

As rural governments have become hollowed out and detached from rural society, can they still effectively implement policies that lack popular support? This article examines a county in Hunan Province, where local governments had strong incentives to implement a national policy of increasing double cropping in rice farming. Small farmers rejected double cropping as unprofitable. Local governments’ limited capacity prevented them from either reshaping small farmers’ economic calculus or coercing compliance. They strategically selected a policy tool acceptable to most small farmers (paid land transfers) and gave new private large-scale producers incentives to double crop by providing subsidies and access to large tracts of farmland. The local governments now rely on large-scale producers as their agents for policy implementation and agricultural governance. This and the collusive relationship that has formed between the two are pushing small farmers out of agriculture.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 78 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.