Assessment of the agricultural sustainability of Shaanxi Province,China

It is significant for the study on the sustainable development of regional agriculture to monitor and measurethe trend of agricultural development with an effective method. The sustainable development of regional agricultureshould accord with regional population, rural economic development, social progress, resource and environmentalsupport. This paper establishes the evaluating indicators system of sustainable development of regional agriculture,evaluates the agricultural sustainable development in Shaanxi Province with a comprehensive multi-indicator method,analyzes the support of resource and environment for regional agriculture by the resource-development index and theenvironment-development index, and gets the conclusion that the indicators, such as education level, the income gapbetween urban and rural residents, the per capita area under cultivation and the consumption of pesticides and chemicalfertilizers per hectare, are the main factors to restrict agricultural sustainability, and that the pressure of the developmentof subsystems of population, economy and society on the subsystems of resource and environment turns out to bestronger and stronger. Agricultural environment gets better, but resource becomes one of the important factors to restrictthe development of regional agriculture. In a word, this paper highlights the potentials and limitations of sustainableagriculture of Shaanxi and helps identify the development direction in the future.