Abstract:

Water Poverty and Agricultural Modernization are two important issues that affects Chinese security and economic development. Studying the coupling relationship between them contributes to promoting the sustainable development of resources environment and economy. The paper selected 30 provincial areas of China including autonomous regions as the research unit. Firstly, the water poverty and agricultural modernization’s evaluation index system was set up, the poverty model and the agricultural modernization index were used to calculate the poverty value and agricultural modernization value of each province, and the time series map was established respectively. Then, the spatial distribution of the two was carried out by ArcGIS. Finally, using the coupling coordination model and the coupled coordination Gini coefficient analyze rural water poverty and agricultural modernization coupling coordination and regional differences, as well as using spatial antocorrelation to analyze the spatio-temporal relationship of rural water poverty, agricultural modernization and coupling coordination from 2005 to 2014. The results are obtained as follows: ① The degree of rural water poverty in China decreases by 14.68%.The reason for the decline is mainly the implementation of the 10^th Five-year Plan. The central water conservancy work attached great importance to solving the water problem in an important position and made a series of major arrangements and water conservancy investments to maintain a high level. But the degree of water poverty fluctuated in that period due to natural disasters of some areas such as rare historical rainfall, typhoons and droughts. The decreasing amplitude in eastern and western China is smaller than that in central China, maintaining the decreasing tendency of “central-west-east”. The degree of rural water poverty in China was positive spatial autocorrelation within a decade. ② Agricultural modernization level slowly increases by 5.5%. The eastern provinces of the agricultural modernization level are kept above the national average, while the central and western regions are kept below the national average. Although the western China increases by 26.88%, the degree of rural water poverty continues the decreasing trend of “east-central-west”.③ The coordination degree of rural water poverty and agricultural modernization are fluctuating, indicating that the corresponding spatial scale keeps the rising trend. In recent years, the increase of coordination degree is 8.03 %.The regional differences of coordination degree between water poverty and agricultural modernization level tend to decline and the Gini index increases by 31.62%. The index in the western region is much higher than eastern region, but the coordination degree has maintained the increasing tendency of “east-central-west”. ④ The “cold-spot” areas of the coordination degree between water poverty and agricultural modernization level shows the contraction tendency while “hot-spot” areas shows the expansion tendency. Finally, this paper makes suggestions how to reduce the rural water poverty, improve the level of agricultural modernization and coordinate them.

Key words: rural water poverty, agricultural modernization, spatio-temporal coupling, coupling coordination model, China