Since there is no clear understanding about whether and to what extent afforestation could affect food security due to the squeeze it causes on arable land, taking the forestry carbon sinks (FCS) projects in pilot regions of China as a quasi-experiment, this paper evaluates the impact of the projects on food security and its underlying mechanisms. The difference-in-difference method and the generalized synthetic control method are employed to address the potential selection biases originating from both the observables and the time-invariant unobservable. Based on panel data from the counties in Sichuan, we find that FCS projects have no significant impact on food security. However, we do reveal that the FCS projects tends to reduce the area of the arable land devoted to food production and to increase the number of agricultural labourers and the grain yield per hectare, while no significant impact on the mechanization of agricultural production and the use of fertilizers has been observed. We also demonstrate that the negative impact of FCS could be compensated by increasing the land production efficiency. Our findings provide the first evidence that FCS do not necessarily and negatively affect food security and can even improve the efficiency of resource use.

原文链接：https://ssrn.com/abstract=4631904