Open AccessTobacco Crop Substitution: Pilot Effort in China
Author(s) -
Virginia C. Li,
Qiongli Wang,
Ning Xia,
Songyuan Tang,
Caroline C. Wang
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
american journal of public health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.284
H-Index - 264
eISSN - 1541-0048
pISSN - 0090-0036
DOI - 10.2105/ajph.2012.300733
Subject(s) - china , cultivation of tobacco , agriculture , crop , agricultural economics , acre , substitution (logic) , public health , agricultural science , business , environmental health , geography , medicine , economics , environmental science , forestry , programming language , nursing , archaeology , computer science
In China, approximately 20 million farmers produce the world's largest share of tobacco. Showing that income from crop substitution can exceed that from tobacco growth is essential to persuading farm families to stop planting tobacco, grown abundantly in Yunnan Province. In the Yuxi Municipality, collaborators from the Yuxi Bureau of Agriculture and the University of California at Los Angeles School of Public Health initiated a tobacco crop substitution project. At 3 sites, 458 farm families volunteered to participate in a new, for-profit cooperative model. This project successfully identified an approach engaging farmers in cooperatives to substitute food crops for tobacco, thereby increasing farmers' annual income between 21% and 110% per acre.