Evaluating China Food’s Fertilizer Reduction and Efficiency Initiative Using a Double Stochastic Meta-Frontier Method

Improving the efficiency of fertilizer usage is important to achieve sustainable agricultural production. As a major agricultural producer, China formally proposed a national fertilizer reduction and efficiency initiative in 2015. Using the double stochastic meta-frontier method to measure the fertilizer use efficiency of 31 provinces in mainland China from 2005 to 2019, this study evaluates the effectiveness of the said initiative on grain production. The results show that China’s initiative has achieved some success, with the average value of fertilizer use efficiency in national grain production increasing by 2.53 percentage points. However, the changes in fertilizer use efficiency show regional heterogeneity. Specifically, the fertilizer use efficiency of the main grain-producing and marketing regions has increased significantly, while that of grain-producing-and-marketing-balanced regions has declined. Further investigation shows that this phenomenon may be related to the importance attached by local governments to the initiative and the uneven distribution of related resources.