Drall Anviksha, Mandal Sabuj Kumar
T A Pai Management Institute, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Karnataka, India.
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute Of Technology Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Heliyon. 2024 May 7;10(10):e30804. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e30804. eCollection 2024 May 30.
In the face of various agro-climatic shocks when agricultural income becomes highly volatile, farmers often undertake multiple jobholding and engage in non-farm activities for income smoothing. The earnings from these activities are often used to purchase productivity enhancing agricultural inputs. In this context, the impact of non-farm income on intensification of agricultural inputs and the consequent impact on over-all farm efficiency is well documented in the literature. However, with a rapid rise in usage of agricultural inputs with environmentally detrimental impact, very little is known about whether non-farm income has any impact on farmers' environmental efficiency-ability to reduce the amount of polluting inputs to the largest extent possible without reducing the amount of agricultural production. Our study fills the gap in the literature by analysing the impact of non-farm income on environmental efficiency of the farmers. We first estimate the environmental efficiency scores adopting the non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) method and using a household level panel data from Village Dynamics of South Asia project on Indian states for a span of five years (2010-2014). We then estimate the impact of non-farm income on environmental efficiency using Instrumental Variable Tobit Model. Our results show that average environmental efficiency of the Indian farmers was 46 % during the study period indicating the fact that a reduction in polluting agricultural inputs by 54 % was possible without compromising the level of farm production. We also find that for 1 % increase in non-farm income, environmental efficiency of farmers rises by around 4 %. This reflects the environment friendly behaviour of farmers as a channel through which non-farm activities affect usage of environmentally linked inputs. These results provide vital policy insights in terms of how non-farm activities could be integrated with policies related to farming, in order to ensure sustainable agricultural practices.
面对各种农业气候冲击，当农业收入变得高度不稳定时，农民往往会从事多种工作并参与非农业活动以实现收入平滑。这些活动的收入通常用于购买提高生产力的农业投入品。在这种背景下，非农业收入对农业投入集约化的影响以及随之对整体农场效率的影响在文献中已有充分记载。然而，随着对环境有不利影响的农业投入品使用量迅速增加，对于非农业收入是否对农民的环境效率（即在不减少农业产量的情况下尽可能减少污染投入品数量的能力）有任何影响，人们知之甚少。我们的研究通过分析非农业收入对农民环境效率的影响填补了文献中的空白。我们首先采用非参数数据包络分析（DEA）方法，并使用来自南亚村庄动态项目关于印度各邦的家庭层面面板数据，对五年（2010 - 2014年）期间的环境效率得分进行估计。然后，我们使用工具变量托比特模型估计非农业收入对环境效率的影响。我们的结果表明，在研究期间，印度农民的平均环境效率为46%，这表明在不影响农场生产水平的情况下，有可能将污染性农业投入品减少54%。我们还发现，非农业收入每增加1%，农民的环境效率就会提高约4%。这反映了农民的环境友好行为，作为非农业活动影响与环境相关投入品使用的一个渠道。这些结果在如何将非农业活动与农业相关政策相结合以确保可持续农业实践方面提供了重要的政策见解。
