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Does yield gap still matter? Evidence from rice production in China

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Abstract

Narrowing the yield gap is a crucial way to increase grain production without increasing cultivated land to meet the growing demand for food and nutrients. Although estimation of yield gap in major grains (rice, wheat and maize) has been extensively studied at the field and experimental levels in recent decades, hardly any rigorous evidence-based studies have been performed at the farm level for the last decade in China. In this study, we employ production functions to estimate the yield gaps in rice farming and examine the different rice gaps in, e.g., regions and cultivation systems, using data collected from 1,029 farms in China in 2017. The results show that rice yield gap still existed in the surveyed region, although almost all farms had already achieved their potential yield (with a 2% yield gap). Age and distance between homesteads and plot have a negative effect on the yield gap, while household assets play an important role in narrowing the yield gap at the household level. Yield gap also varies considerably among regions, cultivated systems (i.e., early, one-season and late rice) and varieties. Policies aimed at ensuring grain self-sufficiency are suggested to focus more on technological changes to improve the potential yield rather relying on narrowing the yield gap at the household/farm level in rice production.

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Notes

  1. The value of the likelihood ratio test (1130.48) exceeded the critical value (χ2 (7) = 18.475) at the 1% level.

  2. Given that surveyed farmers in Hubei and Jiangsu provinces only cultivated one-season rice, 949 observations of one-season rice farmers in three provinces were used in descriptive statistics and regression analyses.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 71661147002) and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (grant number 2016YFD0201301).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, 5 South Zhongguancun Street, Beijing, 100081, People’s Republic of China

    Zhiqi Sun & Ruifa Hu

  2. Yangtze Delta Region Academy of Beijing Institute of Technology, Jiaxing, 314019, People’s Republic of China

    Ruifa Hu

  3. Institute of Agricultural Economics and Development, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Haidian District, Zhongguancun South Street 12, Beijing, 100081, People’s Republic of China

    Yu Hong

Authors
  1. Zhiqi Sun
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  2. Ruifa Hu
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  3. Yu Hong
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Zhiqi Sun, Yu Hong and Ruifa Hu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Zhiqi Sun and Yu Hong, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yu Hong.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 Estimated results for production function
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Table 4 Estimated results for the scaling function and technical efficiency equation
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Fig. 1
figure 1

Cultivated area of early rice, one-season rice, and late rice in Jiangxi province

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Sun, Z., Hu, R. & Hong, Y. Does yield gap still matter? Evidence from rice production in China. Food Sec. 14, 829–840 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-022-01261-4

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