From traditional agriculture to low-carbon agriculture:policies and implications in developed countries

In the past 30 years after the economic reform, agricultural production in China has shifted from traditional to modern agriculture. This has featured high input, high consumption and high productivity agriculture in the country. Although modern agriculture has greatly improved food production in China, it has also exerted huge pressure on the natural ecological environment. This paper therefore aimed to explore ways to develop low-carbon agriculture that is characterized by low consumption of energy and resources, low inputs, and low pollution. Low-carbon agriculture has attracted a lot of attention, especially facing climate change, with the purpose to enhance current agricultural production and management systems. To this end, policies measures have played significant roles in the agricultural sector. This paper therefore drew on documented literature to review and analyze policy related issues to low-carbon agriculture in developed countries. This was treated from the perspective of reducing carbon emissions in accordance with prescribed policy goals, monitoring agricultural production systems through optimized fertilizer and waste use, implementing energy tax as an incentive to encourage the development and use of new materials and new energy, encouraging scientific and technological developments to protect and rehabilitate the environment, subsidizing agriculture as financial measures to facilitate public and private partnerships, exploring the means of carbon evaluation in agricultural energy consumption and waste discharge, and monitoring green/organic food production. These measures were further generalized as policy tools including governance and management, industrial standards of agriculture, carbon tax laws and regulations for environment protection, subsidy measures, car-bon trading, and certificated agricultural zoning plan. These tools were applied in the context of China to make relevant laws and, enacting and implementing industrial standards that encourages technological development, improving financial mechanisms, ad-justing agricultural subsidy measures, planning agricultural zones that facilitated regional cooperation, improving certification sys-tems of food, encouraging private/public partnerships, and coordinating various policies and departments for developing low-carbon agriculture. By analyzing experiences of developed countries and the roles of various policy tools, this paper improved policy capac-ity building for developing low-carbon agriculture that facilitated agricultural production transformation in China from high-input and high-pollution sector to low-carbon sector.