Understanding farmer decisions on land use conversions (LUC) in rural areas has significant importance to understand and predict the patterns of land use changes in China. Many methods have been developed to search for the influencing factors on land use changes at farm household level. However, these methods have difficulty in evaluating the intertwined influences between factors and achieving farmer decision rules on LUC.

WHAT IS MEANT BY AGRIBUSINESS?

Agribusiness as used in this paper refers to very big corporations that produce, process, trade, and market agricultural food products and agricultural inputs. Examples are corporations that produce inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers, and those that produce for supermarkets and retail chains. Transnational agribusiness companies are those that operate in the agriculture sector of many countries, usually with a huge volume of business.

This issue paper is about what is known as the “global financial crisis,” which is said to have affected the economies in Europe and North America and caused massive loss of jobs and bankruptcy in these countries. For some of us here in the developing world, the global financial crisis may seem very far from us and therefore, has no effect on us. We may even think that it is something that only concerns economists and the business sector.