Tobacco Crop Substitution: Pilot Effort in China
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.
Background and aims ::: To study the impact of land use change (LUC) from native vegetation and pasture to sugarcane cultivation as well as to evaluate the effect of different management practices on long-term SOC dynamics using the CENTURY ecosystem model.