Effects of Policy-Based Rice Insurance on Cultivated Land Quality Protection Behavior Among Large-Scale Farmers: Evidence from Pesticide Use Reduction

Cultivated land protection is fundamental to sustainable agricultural development, and reducing pesticide use is a key pathway for improving cultivated land quality. While policy-based agricultural insurance plays an important role in ensuring food security, whether it can promote pesticide-use reduction by influencing farmers’ production decisions remains unclear. Using survey data from 521 large-scale rice farmers in Jiangxi Province, China, this study takes the coverage depth of policy-based rice insurance as the core explanatory variable and employs ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation, the instrumental variable (IV) approach, and propensity score matching (PSM) to examine its effect on pesticide expenditure. Furthermore, the mediating roles of green technology adoption and farmland operational scale are explored. Specifically, for every one-unit increase in the coverage depth of policy-based rice insurance, pesticide expenditure decreases by 0.169 units. The results show that (1) greater insurance coverage depth significantly reduces pesticide expenditure among large-scale rice farmers, and this finding remains robust across a series of robustness tests and after addressing endogeneity concerns; (2) policy-based rice insurance promotes pesticide expenditure reduction by encouraging green technology adoption and expanding farmland operational scale; and (3) the pesticide-reduction effect is more pronounced among farmers with larger operational scales and more extensive farming experience. Based on these findings, efforts should be made to dynamically optimize the policy-based rice insurance system, strengthen its risk protection capacity, improve agricultural resource allocation efficiency, enhance its green incentive effects, and implement differentiated insurance support policies with more accurate compensation mechanisms.