Livelihood consequences of the Grain for Green Programme across regional and household scales: A case study in the Loess Plateau

In 2018, the Chinese government issued a “Work Plan of Eco-poverty Alleviation” aimed at reducing rural poverty by implementing a new round of ecological construction programmes. The Grain for Green Programme (GGP), one of the largest ecological construction programmes in the world, is reconsidered and included in the tasks of the work plan. However, the first round of the GGP has controversial effects on rural livelihood and remains to be further investigated. This study focuses on a farm-pastoral county in the Loess Plateau to explore the impacts of the GGP on rural livelihood consequences across regional and household scales based on the Difference-in-Differences (DID) model and the emergy analysis method. The results indicate that the GGP has negative effects on rural livelihood outcomes in Jungar Banner, especially in the farmland-retiring period. On the regional scale, the GGP actually reduced rural households’ net income and livelihood diversity due to the substantial decrease in graziery income and insufficient compensation, the industrial failure of economic forest schemes, and invalid labour training. On the household scale, the smallholder agro-pastoral system transitioned from an extreme dependence on the environment to another extreme prohibition against grassland grazing. Although the GGP alleviated the environment load ratio, it lowered the emergy yield ratios and undermined the sustainability of the smallholder agro-pastoral system. The failure of the GGP to improve rural livelihoods is deeply rooted in policy that still puts ecological goals ahead of economic goals and thereby hinders rural households’ access to land resources. This study indicates that the government should be cautious about the policy expectations of eco-poverty alleviation and, in future ecological construction, must activate farmers' land use and balance both the economic effectiveness and ecological friendliness.