Changing the Cultivation Pattern and its Effect on the Structure of Stable Economy (Case Study: Rural Areas of Gilan Province)

Agriculture plays a key role in empowering the government to achieve and maintain food self-sufficiency. Sustainable agricultural growth depends significantly on its transformation process, which in turn is associated with changes in cultivation patterns. Determining the optimal cultivation pattern is one of the issues that are highly considered in agricultural economics. Various studies of economic development emphasize both the importance of changing the pattern of cultivation in the process of rural development and its role as an important factor in reducing the income gap and poverty of rural households. The purpose of this article is to investigate the effects of changing the cultivation pattern on the economic structure from the perspective of villagers with a structural equation modeling approach. Library and field studies were conducted in relation to the villages of Astara, Talesh and Rudsar in Guilan province. For this purpose, 390 households in the villages of these three cities, which changed the cultivation pattern from rice to kiwi, were selected as a sample. The present research is applied research in terms of purpose and descriptive-causal research in nature. The results show that the measured validity of all five measurement models as well as the second-order five-factor model is acceptable to investigate the effects of changing the cultivation pattern. Finally, production boom (0/30), the increase in investment (0/18), improvement of business environment (0/66), reduction of villagers' debt (0/46) and reduction of migration (0/22) are among the factor burdens. Based on this, it can be said that the citrus cultivation pattern has played an effective role on the economic structure of the studied villages.