Trends and impacts of changes in agricultural activities

Many people and little land are the basic characteristics of China's agricultural development. China's per capita arable land area is only 0.092hm2, which is far lower than that of developed countries such as the United States, France and Spain, but higher than that of Japan (Table 5-2). From the irrigation conditions of arable land, China's per capita irrigated arable land area of 0.044hm2, close to or exceeding the level of the major developed countries; agricultural water consumption up to 366.35 billion m3, the average water consumption per hectare of arable land of 6,265.4m3, agricultural water consumption accounted for 62% of the country's total water consumption, higher than in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and other developed countries, and only lower than in Spain. In terms of chemical fertilizer use, China's agricultural fertilizer application is as high as 52.390 million tons, much higher than that of major developed countries; the average fertilizer application per hectare of arable land is 0.43t/hm2, which is 3.1 times higher than that of the United States, Italy and Spain, 2.3 times higher than that of Germany and France, and 1.6 times higher than that of the United Kingdom and Japan, which indicates that China's chemical fertilizer application is too high in general, and the efficiency of chemical fertilizer use is low.

Table 5-2 Comparison table of major indicators between China and developed countries

Continued

Note: China's data are mainly 2008 data from China Statistical Yearbook; foreign data are mostly 2006 data, mainly from World Statistical Yearbook 2008, World Bank's World Development Indicators 2010, CIA's The World FactbooK and UN's World Factbook. World FactbooK" and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs "World urbanization prospects 2007" and so on.

In recent years, China's arable land area and agricultural water consumption have stabilized, while chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals have been increasing. In view of the actual situation of China's resource endowment, the national "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" puts forward the strategy of building a resource-saving society, through the development of water-saving agriculture, the promotion of rainwater harvesting, the construction of water-saving irrigated forage bases, and improve the efficiency of water utilization, to basically realize the total zero-growth of irrigation water consumption. It is expected that in the coming period, the country will continue to adhere to the development direction of water-saving agriculture, and will vigorously develop agricultural biotechnology and high-tech, improve the efficiency of fertilizer utilization, and reduce the pollution of the environment.

Based on the above understanding, it can be deduced that:In the future, China's arable land area and effectively irrigated arable land area will remain stable, soil erosion will be weakened, agricultural water consumption will be stable and declining, fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals applied will continue to grow in the near future, but in the medium and long term may be a slow decline. According to this judgment, overall agricultural activities on the development of the geological environment will be stable in the pressure to reduce, but the pollution pressure on the geological environment will continue for a longer period of time.