College of Economics and Management, Nanjing Forestry University, 159 Longpan Road, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, 210037, China.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2022 Jan;29(5):7972-7983. doi: 10.1007/s11356-021-16277-0. Epub 2021 Sep 4.
The overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (CFPs) has negatively impacted the environment and human health. It is an urgent issue that should be addressed. In this study, we investigate whether agricultural cooperatives can serve as an institutional arrangement that helps reduce the consumption of CFPs, using the data of 2012 family farms from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China. Various approaches, including instrumental variable-based two-stage residual inclusion approach (2SRI), endogenous switching probit (ESP) model, and endogenous switching regression (ESR) model, are utilized to help address the endogeneity issues of the cooperative membership variable. The results show that agricultural cooperative membership significantly increases the probability of reducing fertilizers and pesticides of the family farms and improves net return per yuan CFPs. The further analysis shows that agricultural cooperative production services reduced the usage of fertilizers and pesticides, while cooperatives marketing services only significantly lowered the use of pesticides. Our findings highlight the importance of promoting the development of agricultural cooperatives to support green agricultural production in China.
化肥和农药（CFPs）的过度使用已经对环境和人类健康造成了负面影响。这是一个亟待解决的问题。在这项研究中，我们利用农业部 2012 年家庭农场的数据，调查了农业合作社是否可以作为一种制度安排，帮助减少 CFPs 的使用。我们采用了多种方法，包括基于工具变量的两阶段残差纳入法（2SRI）、内生转换概率模型（ESP）和内生转换回归模型（ESR），以帮助解决合作社成员变量的内生性问题。结果表明，农业合作社成员显著增加了家庭农场减少化肥和农药使用的可能性，并提高了每元 CFPs 的净收益。进一步的分析表明，农业合作社的生产服务减少了化肥和农药的使用，而合作社的营销服务仅显著降低了农药的使用。我们的研究结果强调了促进农业合作社发展的重要性，以支持中国的绿色农业生产。
