An Empirical Study of Farmers’ Perception and Behavior on Farmland Abandonment in Yunnan Province

In this study, using the PRA method, we conduct a questionnaire survey on 525 farmers in 10 typical villages in Yunnan Province, and study the farmers' farmland abandonment behavior as well as their perception. Studies have shown that there are some common problems for the villages in the inner suburbs and the villages in the outer suburbs such as small scale of rural land, dispersed plots and land fragmentation, and the scale and fragmentation problems are more prominent in the villages in the inner suburbs while the dispersed plot problems are more obvious in the villages in the outer suburbs; the levels of farmland abandonment vary in different sample villages, the farmland abandonment is more prevalent in the villages in the outer suburbs, the abandonment behavior involves more farmers, and farmers tend to abandon small plots of farmland; the proportion of the abandoned farmland perceived by the farmers in the villages in the inner and outer suburbs (especially in the inner suburbs) is significantly lower than the actual proportion, and farmers' perception greatly deviates from the actual reality; some farmers have wrong perception of farmland abandonment behavior, and even if there are farmers with correct perception, they also abandon farmland.