Grain security is an essential issue for countries across the world. China has witnessed over the last decades not only a rapid growth in the volume of the grain production, but also a divergence in its geographical distributions. Existing studies on the influencing factors of grain production have overlooked thus spatial heterogeneity. This paper investigates the factors that cause the geographical heterogeneity in grain output levels in Guangdong province of China, in terms of land, labor and capital. To address the spatial attenuation effect of the influencing factors, we use the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) on samples of different spatial ranges, which include a total of 530 southern counties from 2015 to 2017. The results show that (a) the effect of land endowment on grain output vary across the east and the west, and between coastal and inland areas; (b) the effect of labor endowment on grain output are inconsistent in the sign and magnitude of the estimates across counties; (c) the effect of agricultural capital on grain production shows heterogeneity spatially (across the east and the west) and economically (across developed and less developed regions). We then analyze the potential mechanism behind this spatial heterogeneity, as well as its policy implications.

Affected by the small scale of forest farmers’ land and the imperfect development of the forest land transfer market, China’s forest rights mortgage loans have suffered from more serious credit rationing. The application of financial linkage theoretically has the effect of solving credit rationing. However, previous studies on financial linkages have focused on the field of credit lending, whereas the applied studies in the field of mortgage lending are mainly case studies on transaction models, and empirical tests on the application of financial linkages in mortgage lending are lacking. Therefore, to fill this gap, this study analyzed the effect of financial linkage on credit rationing for forestry mortgage loans and the mechanism of action through a study of farmers in Fujian, one of the key collective forestry areas in China, using the PSM method with 785 sample values. The results show the following: (1) Financial linkages have a significant mitigating effect on supply rationing, demand rationing, and the total rationing of forest rights mortgage loans. Compared to non-participation, financial linkages significantly reduced total rationing by 15.2%, with a 5% reduction in supply rationing and a 10.2% reduction in demand rationing. (2) The impact of financial linkage differs significantly among heterogeneous farmers. It has a significant mitigating effect on supply rationing for small-scale farmers, but not for large-scale farmers; meanwhile, it better mitigates demand rationing for large-scale farmers than for small-scale farmers. (3) In the mechanistic test, financial linkages were found to moderate the relationship between the value of collateral and supply rationing for small-scale farmers, and transaction costs play an intermediary role in the relationship between financial linkages and demand-based rationing. According to the study results, in order to promote the development of forest rights mortgage loans, it is necessary to develop different lending strategies for heterogeneous farmers, to further encourage small- and medium-sized farmers to participate in financial linkages, as well as to further reduce the related transaction costs.

Aiming at the problems of low accuracy and long evaluation time of performance evaluation of rural forestry economic cooperation organizations, a performance evaluation method of rural forestry economic cooperation organizations based on intelligent fuzzy algorithm is proposed. Under the principles of scientificity, feasibility, comprehensiveness, and importance, build the performance evaluation system of rural forestry economic cooperation organization, and obtain 17 evaluation indexes, such as the supply of means of production, the internal management of the cooperation organization, and the unified product brand. Deal with the missing data and standardize the index data, construct the evaluation index judgment matrix according to the judgment matrix scale, and test the consistency of the judgment matrix through CI. The square root method is used to calculate the performance evaluation index weight of rural forestry economic cooperation organization. Intelligent fuzzy algorithm is used to evaluate the performance of rural forestry economic cooperation organization. Simulation results show that this method has high accuracy and short evaluation time.