Research on Factors Affecting Farmers' Willingness to Join Forestry Cooperation Organizations: A Case Study of Liaoning Province

The property rights of collective forests were clarified through the reforms on it since 2008, and the family-contract-management system for forest land was stabilized. However this led to the small scale of forest land management, which is not favorable to intensive management, and also limits the further increase of the efficiency of collective forest management. In this research, we used Probit model to make a quantitative analysis on the willingness of joining the forestry cooperation organizations among 500 farmers from 50 villages of 10 counties in Liaoning Province. The results show that the following factors have certain influences on the directions and degrees of farmers'willingness: the number of forestry cooperation organizations in the villages, whether individuals have received professional education of forest technology, the area of forest land, the size of family, agricultural land area per capita, whether family members work as village leaders, and income per capita. It is suggested in this paper that the government should give more policy support for developing forestry cooperation organizations, strengthening service capacity of forestry cooperation organizations, and therefore promote the larger scale management of the farmers'forest land resources.