Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 108, September 2021, 105588
Land Use Policy

Why do farmers abandon agricultural lands? The case of Western Iran

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105588Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This study aimed to identify the reasons and causes for the abandonment of agricultural lands (ALA).

  • The legal-managerial item was the most important factor in ALA.

  • Economic causes are the second most important factor in the causes of ALA.

  • Segmented farms and lack of agricultural cooperatives are the most important issues in the legal-managerial factor.

  • A combination of policies and strategies should be used to prevent agricultural land use change.

Abstract

Agricultural land conversion (ALC) and agricultural land abandonment (ALA) have a direct relationship with different economic, social, and environmental issues. The change in land management and land use, in addition to economic and social effects, has a major impact on the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soil, quantity and quality of water resources, and air quality. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the drivers of abandoning agricultural lands in Sanandaj county in Iran using a structural equation modeling method. A systematic random sampling method was followed by a proportionate strategy for the selection of 351 samples from a total of 4500 farmers. Data were collected through a questionnaire developed during a comprehensive literature review. The results showed that the causes of ALA can be categorized into five drivers: economic, social, political, agro-technical, and managerial-legal ones. These drivers have a two-way relationship, both direct and indirect, with each other. According to the farmers' views, the most effective cause of ALA was managerial-legal with a factor loaded value of 0.79. The most important issues in the legal-managerial factor were lack of a strong and efficient land use management for lands around cities, inhibition of land fragmentation Act during the legacy after the culmination of Iran's revolution in 1978, purchasing agricultural lands around the city for housing construction purposes, the problem of segmented farms, and not paying enough attention to establish and enforce agricultural cooperatives. Therefore, better support of legal management issues about agricultural lands leads to better control of land use change (LUC).

Introduction

A very important condition for the life and growth of human beings and civilization, as well as a cornerstone for the welfare of a country, is the proper use of land as a limited resource. If, for a long time, farmland is not used for farming operations, it eventually becomes an abandoned field. In such an empty environment, there can be a variety of different issues, and transitions from rural to urban land use are especially troublesome due to the irreversible impacts of such changes (Barati et al., 2015, Bell et al., 2021, Liu et al., 2020, Slätmo, 2017).

Therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, the management of abandoned agricultural land and its successful use are important to every region (Suziedelyte Visockiene et al., 2019). The subject of the land and how to use it in the social sphere has always been the source of conflict and legal or public problems (Mehrabi-Boshrabadi and Arjmandi, 2013). Agricultural land conversion (ALC) has now become a complex process that involves various variables and drivers at different levels of social and spatial development (Abolina and Luzadis, 2015). For many commercial, social, political, and environmental mechanisms, changes in land use are closely interrelated. In time and space, these mechanisms overlap and provide a diverse set of connections between human drivers and the environment (Ustaoglu et al., 2016). In land-use research, physical, political, and economic variables are well defined. Nevertheless, there were a few attempts to model all variables under land-use transition. The change in land management and land use, in addition to economic and social effects, has a major impact on the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the soil, the quantity and quality of water resources, and air quality. Studies (Dang et al., 2020, Deines et al., 2020, Nguyen and Warr, 2020, Sannigrahi et al., 2020, Song et al., 2020, Wojewodzic et al., 2021, Ying et al., 2020) on the economic and social impacts of land use have found that land use change has an impact on employment, income and expenditure, household participation's rate, and land prices. Studies in Iran have also shown that both the trend of agricultural and natural land use change and the various social, economic, and environmental impacts of these changes have been increased in recent years (Allahyari et al., 2013, Azadi et al., 2016, Barati et al., 2015, Eynali et al., 2013). Asimeh et al. (2020) studied the agricultural sustainability in two different regions (with and without land leveling and consolidation), and found that in unleveled and unconsolidated lands, the economic dimensions of sustainability were in a weak status. In a qualitative study on ALC, Tahmasebi et al. (2020) found that these changes can be driven by natural (climate change), institutional, economic, social, and psychological drivers. Jahanifar et al. (2020) studied that the economic and social drivers play an important role in shifting agricultural lands into residential areas in Hyrcanian forest Areas in the south of Iran. Therefore, it can be said that land use change (LUC) occurs for various causes, which in the research mentioned above, most of these reasons are rooted in economic, social, psychological, natural (climate change), and organizational drivers. However, reasons such as management and monitoring, especially legal drivers, have received less attention from researchers. Therefore, this study seeks to bridge the gap between the legal and managerial reasons of agricultural land conversion (ALC), as well as other reasons.

The dramatic effect of LUC and land cover on the physical and social environment is an incentive for research to understand the causes of this phenomenon and its main effects, including conservation and land abandonment. The core problem in this research is the conservation and abandonment of agricultural lands in Sanandaj, which can be addressed through ALC policies. In the Kurdistan province, and especially in the city of Sanandaj, agricultural lands abandonment is often due to geographical conditions (slope of land), problems associated with extensive land reform, and agricultural land transfer laws. Although there is insufficient evidence in this area (Ahmadpour and Alavi, 2014, Ghadermazi, 2012), the main purpose of this analysis is to figure out the reasons and causes of the abandonment of agricultural land (ALA) around Sanandaj. The key objective of the analysis is, therefore, to analyze both drivers influencing ALA in Sanandaj.

Overseas researchers (Li et al., 2019, Rahman et al., 2016, Sallustio et al., 2018, Suziedelyte Visockiene et al., 2019, Ustaoglu et al., 2016) reported economic drivers such as residential and commercial uses, industrial developments, infrastructure, and real estate market as effective drivers in ALC. Some empirical evidence in Iran (Eynali et al., 2013, Ghadermazi, 2012, Rezaee-Moghadam et al., 2014) considered economic drivers as the most important effective reasons in ALC and abandonment of the lands. Furthermore, the results of Yazdani and Hashemibonab’s (2014) study showed that land use changes were influenced by drivers such as high profits from land sales, rising land prices, and insufficient income from agriculture. Barati et al. (2015) believe that these reasons are attributed to the low-price level of agricultural products, price volatility, excessive increase in land prices, poverty, and unemployment in Iranian villages. The results of the study by Darban-Aastaneh et al. (2016) showed that the most important economic drivers of LUC are low prices of agricultural products, high cost of living and unprofitable agricultural income, high inflation in society, and higher income from land than agriculture. The findings of Kalali Moghaddam (2015) consider the drivers affecting LUC as expensive agricultural inputs and low prices of crops, and the problem of ALC is more influenced by economic drivers than other drivers. In another similar research, Ahmadpour and Alavi (2014) identified the lack of initial conditions of cultivation, lack of access to production inputs, and high input prices as effective drivers in changing agricultural land use. Mehrabi-Boshrabadi and Arjmandi (2013) conclude that the most important cause of LUC in the villages is people's economic problems (low income and lack of financial supports).

Given the positive association of economic drivers with the land use reasons, the following hypothesis was established:

H1

: Economic drivers will be positively associated with ALA.

The studies conducted by other researchers (Abolina and Luzadis, 2015, Barati et al., 2015, Handavu et al., 2019, Lipton and Saghai, 2017, Liu et al., 2016) emphasized the social and cultural causes of agricultural land use. According to Clements et al. (2020), landholders in South Africa are considered as major threats to sustainable land management. They have identified wider socio-economic challenges (e.g., community violence, national and political regulation, and global economic recessions) in this regard. As shown by Yan et al. (2020), the agro-pastoral transformation region in Kazakhstan was the region most influenced by changes in land use due to structural social changes. Demands for behavioral change and social learning affect farmers’ motivation and ability to change their practices about land lease in the Netherlands (Westerink et al., 2020). The findings of Wayessa (2020) revealed that the land leases induced a significant decline in land-based social relations in both crop production and livestock husbandry systems. Maharjan et al. (2020) showed that in Nepal ALA is higher in mountain areas than in the plains (Terai). They also found out that the internal outmigration of women has a significant positive effect on ALA. This demonstrates that when males leave, women continue farming, resulting in the feminization of agriculture, but when women leave in large numbers, only aging parents are left, who are frequently unable to continue farming.

The results of a study by Mazzocchi et al. (2013) showed that the most important drivers that cause changes in agricultural land use are drivers related to urban pressure such as population density. In other words, the importance of drivers differs in areas, which are close to urban centers and have high population density, and in the remote areas with low population density. Therefore, in the first case, there are pull factors from urban centers that cause ALA, and in the latter case, there are push factors (rural poverty) that cause ALA. Karbasi et al. (2018) showed that variables of farmer family population, number of land parcels, farmer's income, and level of farmer's literacy have an influence on decision making in land use change. According to Barati et al. (2015), the most important social causes of ALC are the low interest of the new generation of rural people to work in the agricultural sector and the discrimination against the agricultural sector in comparison with the industrial and other sectors. Furthermore, according to a study by Darban-Aastaneh et al. (2016), the important LUC drivers are the increasing population of indigenous rural inhabitants, young people's unwillingness to farm, changing living standards, and inclination to urbanization.

Population expansion and urbanization growth have been considered as the most important social drivers of land use around cities (Abd-Elmabod et al., 2019, Abd EL-kawy et al., 2019, Ayambire et al., 2019, Feng et al., 2019, Peerzado et al., 2019, Tian et al., 2019). Accordingly, it can be found that social factor has a significant impact on agricultural land use. Therefore, the following hypothesis was addressed:

H2

Social drivers have a positive effect on ALA.

ALA has a negative impact on the local economy and environment because land, as a primary resource for agriculture, is underutilized (Yusoff et al., 2017). The conversion of agricultural land has been unhindered in recent years in order to implement comprehensive urban, industrial, and mineral development plans that are deemed necessary. To take necessary steps to rehabilitate ALA, government's policies must be identified and acknowledged (Suziedelyte Visockiene et al., 2019). To manage ALA, the Iranian government employs a variety of tools and policies, including: 1) comprehensive agricultural land registration system implementation; 2) approval of land reform regulations; 3) guaranteed purchase of some strategic crops such as wheat, and 4) improving farmers’ livelihood by registering agricultural land tenure rights, which can strengthen institutions (rules of the game), reduce uncertainty and enable farmers to consider longer time horizon when making their plans and investments (Alijani et al., 2020, Mesgaran et al., 2017).

In the study by Ustaoglu and Williams (2017), it was found that the anticipated subsidies in public agricultural policies are effective in preventing urbanization and the destruction of agricultural lands. There are institutional barriers for ALA and LUC in Europe, and both the policy sphere and collaborative options for management need to be considered. The development of a dedicated allocation policy, mobilization of local government authorities, and establishment of strategic collaborations between governmental and non-governmental actors are the main recommendations provided by Pace Ricci and Conrad (2018). Furthermore, Primdahl (2014) states that agricultural, environmental, and spatial policies, when not considered together, are not capable to respond to the cross-dynamics of agricultural and urban developments. Azadi et al. (2016) identified the expansion of urbanization and non-intervention of governments in agricultural land policies as important drivers related to ALC. In his research, Shafiee-Sabet (2013) concluded that there was a relationship between variables related to rural environment capacity (number of services and infrastructure), decentralization policies (amount of loans distributed and number of rural development activities), and amount of agricultural land conservation. Some of the other political reasons and evidence of agricultural land use stated empirically by some researchers (Jürgenson, 2016, Urruty et al., 2016, Arvor et al., 2017, Mu et al., 2018, Paudel et al., 2019, Wang et al., 2018, Wästfelt and Zhang, 2018) are the implementation of agrarian reform, sale of lands around the city for industrial use, lack of public awareness and consequences of land use change, not implementing the existing laws and negligence by government officials, lack of strong and efficient management on land use around cities, and lack of coordination between organizations issuing land use permits.

As such, the next hypothesis we established was as follows:

H3

ALA has a positive relationship with policy variables.

The results of the studies conducted in Iran indicate that managerial and legal drivers are among the most important drivers affecting the LUC. In a study by Mehrabi-Boshrabadi and Arjmandi (2013), they identified the most important deterrents to land use change, the formulation of effective land use legislation, and government support for farmers and gardeners. The results of the study by Ahmadpour and Alavi (2014) showed that migration trends from Tehran to suburban areas are overshadowed by the lack of land use monitoring institutes and lack of land use planning in suburban areas. Shamseddini and Amir-Fahliani (2015) examined the drivers affecting rural land use management and stated that the problem of land use and management should be analyzed due to lack of land and its inaccessibility by a strategic method. Dadashpour and Mohsenzadeh (2012), in their study on the feasibility of using development rights transfer to protect agricultural lands, concluded that development rights transfer approach is one of the approaches to prevent agricultural land use (development rights ratio should be between 25 and 75). The following empirical studies highlight the weaknesses of legal and managerial changes in agricultural land use: Petrescu-Mag et al. (2018), Pace Ricci and Conrad (2018), Ekpodessi and Nakamura (2018), Yucer et al. (2016), and Zhang et al. (2019).

Therefore, without paying attention to managerial and legal drivers, the ALC will not be solved. Thus, the following hypothesis was addressed:

H4

Legal and managerial drivers will be positively associated with ALA.

In the research by Handavu et al. (2019), the most important drivers affecting forest land use are agricultural growth and population growth. Azadi et al. (2016) identified the most important technical causes of ALC as lack of a suitable cropping pattern, land fragmentation, depletion of water resources, low yields of current irrigation methods, and insufficient monitoring of land use change. Conventional farming systems or no ability to use modern farming practices (de Souza Medeiros et al., 2020) and sloping lands (Maharjan et al., 2020) are other reasons for ALA.

Westlund and Nilsson (2019) analyzed the number and scale of agricultural companies, and found that improvements in their key task and diversification patterns will preserve land use shifts across the larger cities and the capital area in particular. Some farming practices such as crop rotation, plugging, and the planting and logging of forestry disturb and change agricultural land covers of Great Britain (Tomlinson et al., 2018).

Piquer-Rodríguez et al. (2018) showed that the extension of cropland and pasture land into woodlands was much less susceptible than agricultural intensification to shifts in profit-related conditions, so intensification is likely to continue if agricultural demand remains high. Some other scientific documentation and evidence that emphasize the agro-technical causes of ALC are as follows: Barati et al. (2015), Baude et al. (2019), Degife et al. (2018), Fox et al. (2017), Pandey and Seto (2015), Smaliychuk et al. (2016), Stuart and Gillon (2013), Verburg et al.(2004) and Wang et al. (2019).

Furthermore, the association of agricultural-technical drivers with ALU is expected. Thus, the following hypothesis was developed:

H5

Agro-technical drivers will be positively associated with ALA.

Therefore, the main issue addressed in this study is to find out the drivers that lead to inappropriate use of agricultural land in rural areas of central districts of Sanandaj. Identifying the drivers in this regard can not only benefit the authorities but also help farmers and even local people both technically and environmentally learn how to use the existing and abandoned land properly and efficiently. Accordingly, it is imperative to investigate and identify suitable scientific solutions and mechanisms to solve the problems of ALA in the region so that in the future, no more adverse effects will occur, including the degradation of agricultural land. Based on the background of the research, the proposed conceptual model of this research is drawn as Fig. 1.

Section snippets

Study area

Kurdistan province is a wide geographic region (29,137 km2) located in Western Iran. The provincial capital of the province is Sanandaj. The province is a mountainous territory scattered over high plains and throughout the region's large valleys. This province is composed of 10 major cities, 30 towns, 31 districts, 86 rural districts, and 1654 villages, according to the new state divisions in 2019. Its beautiful nature, the unusual topography of this province, and its climatic variety have made

Descriptive data

The farmers' mean age in this study was 44.66 years with a standard deviation of 8.03, the youngest was 26 and the oldest was 58 years old. The distribution of farmers' literacy level shows that 38 people (14.9%) were illiterate, 71 (27.8%) had elementary school education, 70 (27.5%) had around 5–10 years of school-based education, 52 (20.4%) had a high school diploma, and 96 farmers had not answered the question. The cultivated area per average was 2.8 ha, with a standard deviation of 1.6; the

Discussion

Abandoning agricultural lands and LUC are among the most important challenges the agricultural and rural sectors are faced with. These changes in recent decades have had various social, economic, and environmental effects, and their management has always been one of the main challenges that policymakers and decision-makers are faced with. The findings of this research indicate that the structure reviewed for the reasons of abandonment and non-using of agricultural lands can be classified into

Conclusion

The general objective of this study was to identify the main drivers affecting the ALA in Sanandaj city in Iran. According to the results, the five drivers analyzed in this study (legal-managerial, economical, agro-technical, social, and political drivers) had a positive and significant impact on the ALA. Therefore, the hypotheses (H1, H2, H3, H4 and H5) are confirmed. According to the results, the most important ways to prevent ALC and LUC include: a) management; b) control; and c) proper

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Reza Movahedi, Sina Jawanmardi and Hossein Azadi: Conceptualization, Methodology; Reza Movahedi: Data collection, Analyses, Writing - original draft; Reza Movahedi, Sina Jawanmardi, Hossein Azadi, Imaneh Goli, Ants-Hannes Viira and Frank Witlox: Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

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.

References (84)

  • D.A. Dang et al.

    The effects of trust and land administration on economic outcomes: evidence from Vietnam

    Food Policy

    (2020)
  • A. de Souza Medeiros et al.

    Soil carbon losses in conventional farming systems due to land-use change in the Brazilian semi-arid region

    Agric. Ecosyst. Environ.

    (2020)
  • J.M. Deines et al.

    Transitions from irrigated to dryland agriculture in the Ogallala Aquifer: land use suitability and regional economic impacts

    Agric. Water Manag.

    (2020)
  • S.G.N. Ekpodessi et al.

    Land use and management in Benin Republic: an evaluation of the effectiveness of Land Law 2013-01

    Land Use Policy

    (2018)
  • W. Feng et al.

    Effect of land-centered urbanization on rural development: a regional analysis in China

    Land Use Policy

    (2019)
  • T.A. Fox et al.

    Agricultural land-use change in Kerala, India: perspectives from above and below the canopy

    Agric. Ecosyst. Environ.

    (2017)
  • F. Handavu et al.

    Socio-economic factors influencing land-use and land-cover changes in the miombo woodlands of the Copperbelt province in Zambia

    For. Policy Econ.

    (2019)
  • K. Jahanifar et al.

    Land use change drivers in the Hyrcanian Vegetation Area: dynamic simultaneous equations system with panel data approach

    Land Use Policy

    (2020)
  • E. Jürgenson

    Land reform, land fragmentation and perspectives for future land consolidation in Estonia

    Land Use Policy

    (2016)
  • S. Li et al.

    Agricultural land conversion: impacts of economic and natural risk factors in a coastal area

    Land Use Policy

    (2019)
  • M. Lipton et al.

    Food security, farmland access ethics, and land reform

    Glob. Food Secur.

    (2017)
  • X. Liu et al.

    Divergent gross nitrogen transformation paths in the topsoil and subsoil between abandoned and agricultural cultivation land in irrigated areas

    Sci. Total Environ.

    (2020)
  • Z. Liu et al.

    Community-based agricultural land consolidation and local elites: survey evidence from China

    J. Rural Stud.

    (2016)
  • A. Maharjan et al.

    Understanding rural outmigration and agricultural land use change in the Gandaki Basin, Nepal

    Appl. Geogr.

    (2020)
  • C. Mazzocchi et al.

    Land use conversion in metropolitan areas and the permanence of agriculture: Sensitivity Index of Agricultural Land (SIAL), a tool for territorial analysis

    Land Use Policy

    (2013)
  • J.E. Mu et al.

    Adaptation with climate uncertainty: an examination of agricultural land use in the United States

    Land Use Policy

    (2018)
  • H.Q. Nguyen et al.

    Land consolidation as technical change: economic impacts in rural Vietnam

    World Dev.

    (2020)
  • J.M. Pace Ricci et al.

    Exploring the feasibility of setting up community allotments on abandoned agricultural land: a place, people, policy approach

    Land Use Policy

    (2018)
  • B. Pandey et al.

    Urbanization and agricultural land loss in India: comparing satellite estimates with census data

    J. Environ. Manag.

    (2015)
  • B. Paudel et al.

    Farmers’ perceptions of agricultural land use changes in Nepal and their major drivers

    J. Environ. Manag.

    (2019)
  • M.B. Peerzado et al.

    Land use conflicts and urban sprawl: conversion of agriculture lands into urbanization in Hyderabad, Pakistan

    J. Saudi Soc. Agric. Sci.

    (2019)
  • R.M. Petrescu-Mag et al.

    Agricultural land use conflict management—vulnerabilities, law restrictions and negotiation frames. A wake-up call

    Land Use Policy

    (2018)
  • M. Piquer-Rodríguez et al.

    Drivers of agricultural land-use change in the Argentine Pampas and Chaco regions

    Appl. Geogr.

    (2018)
  • S.A. Rahman et al.

    Towards productive landscapes: trade-offs in tree-cover and income across a matrix of smallholder agricultural land-use systems

    Land Use Policy

    (2016)
  • L. Sallustio et al.

    Assessing the economic marginality of agricultural lands in Italy to support land use planning

    Land Use Policy

    (2018)
  • S. Sannigrahi et al.

    Examining effects of climate change and land use dynamic on biophysical and economic values of ecosystem services of a natural reserve region

    J. Clean. Prod.

    (2020)
  • A. Smaliychuk et al.

    Recultivation of abandoned agricultural lands in Ukraine: patterns and drivers

    Glob. Environ. Chang.

    (2016)
  • M. Song et al.

    Influences of land resource assets on economic growth and fluctuation in China

    Resour. Policy

    (2020)
  • D. Stuart et al.

    Scaling up to address new challenges to conservation on US farmland

    Land Use Policy

    (2013)
  • J. Suziedelyte Visockiene et al.

    Analysis and identification of abandoned agricultural land using remote sensing methodology

    Land Use Policy

    (2019)
  • T. Tahmasebi et al.

    Agricultural land use change under climate variability and change: drivers and impacts

    J. Arid Environ.

    (2020)
  • Y. Tian et al.

    Dominant control of climate variations over land-use change on net primary productivity under different urbanization intensities in Beijing, China

    Acta Ecol. Sin.

    (2019)
  • Cited by (12)

    • Assessing the economic effects of drought using Positive Mathematical Planning model under climate change scenarios

      2022, Heliyon
      Citation Excerpt :

      The primary results of this mismanagement include large immigration toward urban areas and increased joblessness rates. Several studies have pointed out the same result; Movahedi et al. (2021) used structural equation modeling to find the most important factors causing the farmers to abandon agricultural lands. The most effective cause of this phenomenon was the managerial-legal factor including the problem of segmented farms, and not paying enough attention to establishing agricultural incentives.

    • Social, economic and environmental vulnerability: The case of wheat farmers in Northeast Iran

      2022, Science of the Total Environment
      Citation Excerpt :

      Mechanization means applying equipment in order to speed up cultivation operations. Interviews indicate the point that mechanization and its settings in different steps are not standard (Movahedi et al., 2021). The role of breeding and certified seed in wheat cultivation is irrefutable.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text