Internet can do help in the reduction of pesticide use by farmers: evidence from rural China
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Internet can do help in the reduction of pesticide use by farmers: evidence from rural China Qiuqian Zhao 1
&
Yuhe Pan 1 & Xianli Xia 1
Received: 21 May 2020 / Accepted: 20 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Promoting agrochemical reduction is a prerequisite for high-quality development of agriculture. It is still controversial whether Internet use can reduce pesticide use. This study uses the survey data of 670 vegetable growers of two provinces in China, Shandong and Shaanxi. Probit model and bootstrap method were used to analyze the impact of Internet use in reduction of pesticide application by farmers. Shallow use and deep use of the Internet were taken into account. On this basis, multiple mediating effects were tested on the following three aspects: information acquisition ability, awareness of green production, and e-commerce sales capability. The study found that shallow use and deep use of the Internet have a significant direct impact on pesticide reduction by farmers. Information acquisition ability, awareness of green production, and e-commerce sales capability all play a significant positive mediating role in the deep use of the Internet affecting pesticide reduction. However, in the process of shallow use of the Internet affecting pesticide reduction, only the mediating effect of green production awareness is significant. Concurrently, compared with the shallow use of the Internet, the deep use of the Internet has a significant positive impact on rural groups with weak human capital and weak social capital. Keywords Internet use . Pesticide reduction . Multiple mediating effects . Bootstrap method
Introduction The industrial revolution driven by the Internet and digitalization is overturning the traditional production model of the world. Stimulating the transformation of the agricultural industry towards modernization and development patterns of the rural society reflect the characteristics of digitalization (Kovács and Husti 2018). In 2019, a digital report jointly released by We Are Social and Hootsuite shows that the global population is 7.68 billion and the netizens are 4.39 billion; the average Internet users in the world spends 6 h and 42 min online every day; the Internet users who spend
Responsible Editor: Baojing Gu * Xianli Xia [email protected] 1
College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, Shaanxi, People’s Republic of China
the most time online are mainly from developing and middle-income countries.1 As of March 2020, the number of rural netizens in China reached 255 million, and the Internet penetration rate in rural areas was 46.2%.2 In China’s “Digital Village Development Strategy Outline” and “China Digital Village Development Report (2019),” they clearly stated to promote green agricultural production, establishing an electronic traceability monitoring system for agricultural inputs, and taking advantage of the industrial chain of agricultural e-commerce to force the standardizati
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