This study examines how Chinese consumers’ awareness, knowledge, and attitudes influences their purchasing behavior for organic rice. The aim is to determine whether regional differences in these factors and in the resulting behavior exist and thereby, to provide the organic rice industry with sufficient information to expand its market and improve profitability. Respondents answered a total of 1,371 questionnaires, whereby 406, 539, and 426 responses came from inland, coastal, and northern regions, respectively. A binary logit regression is applied to analyze the survey data and predict purchasing behavior at the national and regional levels. While the results indicate that consumer awareness, product certification, and product availability factors have a positive impact on the likelihood of purchasing organic rice, the price has a negative relationship with organic rice consumption. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that northern consumers are more likely to buy organic rice than those in inland and coastal regions. In particular, awareness and knowledge factors have a greater influence on purchasing behavior in northern regions. These findings suggest that enhancing consumer awareness of organic rice and providing more purchasing channels could contribute to increasing organic rice consumption.

In the highest soil erosion regions of arid and semiarid northwest China, water resource deficits and farmland misuse have further exacerbated soil degradation. Therefore, understanding how farmers in diverse agroclimatic zones perceive and respond to different conservation practices is important to the implementation of sustainable agriculture practices (SAPs). To this end, this study uses a best–worst scaling approach to examine the adoption preferences for nine SAPs among grain and cash crop farmers and investigates the influence of farm and climatic characteristics on adoption preferences based on a face to face survey of 554 households in Gansu province, which is classified as an arid and semiarid area in northwest China. Both grain and cash crop farmers had stronger preferences for the practices of using organic instead of chemical fertilizers and of improving irrigation practices. In addition, while cash crop farmers also had strong preferences for cover crop-related practices, they preferred long-term fallows least. Household income, livestock, and precipitation influence the potential perceived importance of SAPs. The different perceived importance of these practices suggests new possible combinations or packages for a sustainable agriculture program during the cropping structure adjustment in Gansu.

Although the nutritional and health benefits of buckwheat foods have been widely discussed and evaluated, studies on consumer perceptions of the health benefits of buckwheat functional foods and how these perceived benefits influence their consumption are scarce. On the basis of the theory of planned behavior, this study aimed to explore consumers' purchase intention and behavior toward buckwheat functional foods while assessing the impact of their perceived susceptibility and severity of health concerns on the purchase decisions for such foods. Using data from 1077 participants collected in person from Southwest China, we compared the influencing factors between consumer groups based on whether they were aware of the nutritive and health benefits of buckwheat. The results indicated that, apart from consumers' perceived behavioral control, their perceived susceptibility and perceived severity of three selected common health problems, perceived value and efficacy of buckwheat, and subjective norms were strong predictors of consumers' purchase decisions. Moreover, perceived susceptibility and severity were effective antecedents of the perceived value and efficacy of buckwheat, respectively. Consumers aware of buckwheat's nutritive and health benefits of buckwheat were less affected by perceived efficacy. This study highlights that the higher the susceptibility to the three selected common health problems, the greater the internal and behavioral changes toward the purchase of buckwheat functional foods. These findings reveal factors affecting consumers' healthy eating beliefs, which can be beneficial for both policymakers and marketers in formulating healthy diet policies and strategies in developing countries.

Buckwheat is an important coarse grain often grown in China’s marginal and dry mountainous areas; however, few empirical studies have quantified the factors that increase land productivity and encourage buckwheat farmers’ market participation. To address this gap in the literature, this study aims to empirically identify the factors associated with the land productivity of buckwheat, those associated with buckwheat farmers’ decisions regarding market participation, and those associated with buckwheat selling prices; unique survey data collected from rural buckwheat farmers in China in 2016 are used for the analysis. Our estimation results showed that fertilizer costs and rental machine costs were negatively associated with buckwheat income, indicating the sub-optimality of buckwheat farming. Farmers are likely to sell their buckwheat at high prices if they conduct the initial processing and sell it to processing firms. Providing technical training on the initial processing and information on market channels for buckwheat farmers could serve as efficacious policy interventions. The household head’s educational attainment was positively associated with buckwheat productivity and market participation, indicating the importance of the effort to narrow the educational gap between urban and rural areas in China.

This study focuses on japonica rice (Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica) and examines how product attributes, consumer attitudes, consumer demographics, and regional differences influence different categories of the daily purchase prices of japonica rice in China. Online questionnaires were distributed to 492 respondents from the inland, coastal, and northern regions of China. The study applied an ordered logit regression and a multinomial logit regression to analyze the survey data and understand the differences among various categories based on purchase prices. Consumers with high income and educational levels, who are more concerned with the environment and their health and have greater trust in government supervision of rice quality, as well as inland consumers, are more likely to purchase high‐priced japonica rice, whereas the price factor has a negative relationship with such purchases. The results provide sufficient information to the japonica rice industry to expand its market and improve its profitability.