Rural households' willingness to participate in the Grain for Green program again: A case study of Zhungeer, China

The Grain for Green program (GGP) is one of the most ambitious forestry projects in China. The GGP uses a public payment scheme to propel the participation of rural households in order to make the program acceptable and sustainable. The modification of the GGP for its long-term effectiveness has raised interest from researchers. However, few researchers have realized the role that rural households play in adjusting the GGP. By building an econometric model, we found that the decision making of rural households is optimal when the sum of the marginal benefit from residual farmland and the marginal benefit from agricultural labor time equals the sum of the subsidies for retired farmland, benefits from the increased forest/grassland and the opportunity cost rate of the rural household engaged in agricultural labor divided by agricultural labor efficiency. The results derived by a Logit regression method indicate that the economic benefit and non-monetary values stimulate households' willingness to participate, and households' attitudes have significant effects on their willingness. Our attempt to comprehensively explore the influencing factors concerning households' attitudes, the environment benefits and benefits from the GGP proves to be promising as a reference for future studies and for decision making regarding GGP.