External Supervision, Face Consciousness, and Pesticide Safety Use: Evidence from Sichuan Province, China

Clarifying the factors influencing the safe use of pesticide is essential for scientific decision making to effectively manage pesticide use and promote sustainable agroecological development. The study aims to explore the factors influencing farmers’ safe use of pesticides from the perspectives of external supervision and face consciousness. Using survey data covering 534 farm households in Sichuan province, this study empirically analyzes the influence mechanisms of external supervision, face consciousness, and their interaction terms on farmers’ safe use of pesticides by employing the binary logit and IV-2SLS model, and further reveals their intergenerational differences on this basis. The results show that external supervision and positive face consciousness have significantly positive effects on pesticide safety use by farmers; market supervision and ability-type face, respectively, play the biggest role among them. Furthermore, there is an interaction effect between external supervision and face consciousness with respect to pesticide safety use. Farmers with different generation farms are influenced differently by external supervision and face consciousness. The behaviors of the new generation farmers to safely use pesticide are principally influenced by government supervision, market supervision, and ability-type face; in contrast, the ones of the older generation farmers are mainly influenced by market supervision, organization supervision, and relationship-type face.