The China Agricultural and Forestry Economics and Management Annual Conference, which is the biggest annual academic conference on this topic in China, was successfully held in Kunming, Yunnan Province, from August 22^nd to 23^rd, 2024. With the theme of “Accelerating the Modernization of Agriculture and Rural Areas and Ensuring National Food Security”, the conference invited more than 600 experts and scholars to present reports on academic frontiers in various forms of academic exchanges, such as organized sessions, paper presentations, and excellent paper reports.

Six members of UNEP-IEMP were invited to participate in this conference. Associate Professor Yunli Bai from UNEP-IEMP and Professor Tonglong Zhang from South China Agricultural University led a session titled “Employment of Rural Labor Force” on August 22^nd. Professor Yueqing Ji from Nanjing Agricultural University and Associate Professor Weidong Wang from Beijing Forestry University were invited as panel discussion members. There were 5 papers presented in this session by Zijin Wang, Yongyang Wu, Zihao Chen from China Agricultural University, Kaixuan Zhang from Nanjing Agricultural University, and Yutong Qiu from UNEP-IEMP. Yutong Qiu presented the paper titled “Impact of farmer cooperatives on labor employment: Evidence from rural China”, which investigated the effect of farmer cooperatives on rural labor employment and explored its mechanism. More than 30 scholars participated this session. Additionally, Associate Professor Yunli Bai was invited to serve as a panel discussion member for the session “Sustainable Food Consumption”.

Ph.D. candidate Shaoyue Ma of UNEP-IEMP delivered a report titled “Edutainment: Can the use of short video apps improve household food consumption? Evidence from rural China”, which assessed the role of short video apps in promoting food consumption transformation among rural residents and its mechanism. Ph.D. candidate Xuanye Zeng of UNEP-IEMP gave a presentation on “Has Public Employment Service promoted off-farm employment of rural labor: Evidence from 2000 households in 100 villages across 5 provinces in China between 2004 and 2022”. This study investigated the impact of Public Employment Service policy in rural China on the off-farm employment participation among rural labor and analyzed the minimum implementation period for the policy to be effective. The paper won the Excellent Paper Award at the conference. The master student Jiaojiao Wu gave a presentation on “The Impact of Extreme Weather on the Time Allocation of Rural Residents”, which estimated the impact of four common extreme weather types on the overall time structure of rural residents and discussed the economic significance. Ziyi Zhou, an intern at UNEP-IEMP, gave a presentation on “Total Factor Productivity and GHG emissions intensity of Crop Planting: Evidence Based on the Fixed Observation Rural Survey in China”.

With these activities, UNEP-IEMP members had in-depth exchanges with scholars and students from more than 10 universities and research units and broaden the collaboration network.