Understanding the socioeconomic and environmental drivers of agricultural land conversion in Babol County, Northern Iran: Implications for sustainable land use policies

A major problem of the twenty-first century is agricultural land conversion (ALC), which has occurred over the past five decades as a result of human activity. ALC leads to some economic, social, managerial, and environmental challenges and is strongly linked to food security and environmental sustainability. The ALC in northern Iran is a significant process that strains the social structures of the area. Therefore, this study focused on identifying the drivers of ALC in the county of Babol in northern Iran. After a comprehensive literature study, a questionnaire was designed and data were collected using a face-to-face survey method from 200 randomly- selected farmers. The results showed that farmers found the main drivers of ALC to be fragmentation of agricultural land, increase in the average age and aging of farmers, difficulty of fair access to government and banking facilities and resources, and the non-participation of farmers in policymaking and planning. Based on the SEM method, the most common drivers of ALC were turning land from production input into a profitable commodity, the role of owners of second homes in the village and encouraging residents to change their use, a lack of coordination between government institutions to preserve land and prevent the change of agricultural land use, and climate change and drought in other regions of the country. Therefore, implementing stricter laws to prevent the fragmentation of agricultural land, strengthening the financial resources of villagers, and developing policies to control rural-to-urban migration can play an important role in controlling ALC.