Dynamic Agriculture in East Asia: Land-Livelihood Interactions

Agriculture is an essential industry that provides products for sustaining human life. Changes in agricultural systems have a profound impact on food security and environmental health. As one of the most densely populated regions in the world, East Asia has evolved into having a relatively stable mode of smallholder agriculture and homogeneous rural societies in the past forty centuries. However, subsistence smallholder agriculture has been abandoned due to the massive industrialization and urbanization in this region since the end of the 20th century.

A livelihood is a means of gaining a living and encompasses the capacity, assets, and activities required for achieving livelihood goals. The livelihood enterprises of rural households can generally be divided into agricultural production and off-farm employment, while farmers must carefully consider how to invest their resources into the two enterprises since they are extremely limited in time and capital. Thus, farmers’ attitudes and behaviors toward agricultural production essentially depend on their livelihood choices. As the carrier of agricultural production, the quantity and quality of land is another key factor that affects the form of agricultural systems. Therefore, the dynamic change in agricultural systems is essentially driven by rural livelihood transitions in the context of socioeconomic transformation, such as the introduction of smart farming, innovation of farm mechanization and reform of agricultural policy, while the process must be based on the state of land resources.