Abstract Agricultural production is a complex process involving both natural and economic reproduction, which often presents strong volatility. The frequent natural disasters and decentralized management make China’s agricultural production more complex. Identifying, evaluating, and managing agricultural production risks have always been the focus of researchers and policy managers. A comprehensive summary and review of the relevant theories of agricultural production risks will contribute to its future development. The connotation of agricultural production risks is derived from the general concept of risk, which refers to the possibility that the actual yield of agricultural products is lower than the expected yield due to various risk factors.The connotation of agricultural production risks needs to be understood from two aspects. On the one hand, the risk factors of agricultural production should not only refer to meteorological disasters, but also include a series of possible yield reduction factors such as pollution, pests, and diseases. On the other hand, in specific evaluation cases, most scholars use probability to quantify the possibility of loss. For pollution, pests, and diseases, however, this may be rather difficult, and only semi-quantitative evaluation can be done with thefocus on the size of the expected loss. There are three kinds of quantitative assessment methods of agricultural production risks: parametric distribution fitting, kernel density estimation, and nonparametric information diffusion modeling. The parametric distribution fitting method has good gradualness but it depends on the subjective hypothesis of a prior distribution. The kernel density estimation method is flexible but it does not perform well in small samples and cannot capture extreme events. The nonparametric information diffusion modeling method is suitable for small sample data but the key parameters of this method do not have any unified standard, and the specific probability density function cannot be obtained. The risk assessment of agricultural production ispracticed at the national and provincial levels. The production risks caused by specific factors such as pollution, diseasespests, andmeteorology, as well the comprehensive production risks under the joint action of multiple factors are all involved in the literature. At the same time, the risk assessment of agricultural production has been widely used in risk warning, risk zoning, financial product pricing, and insurance subsidy policy improving. In the absence of an effective external risk dispersion mechanism, farmers will adopt such measures as income diversification, production diversification, planting low-risk crops, reducing risk investment, and smoothing consumption to carry out "self-insurance". The experience of low-income countries shows that these strategies are not all effective and have potentially high costs while stabilizing production. Moreover, these strategies may be an important explanation for the slow growth of farmers' income and even the danger to fall into the poverty trap they are facing. As a hotspot in agricultural economics, innovative research results are expected to yield in the domain of the evaluation methods of agricultural production risks, evaluation cases, the effectiveness of management strategies, and the design of intervention mechanisms.
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