sustainability Article Status of Farmland Abandonment and Its Determinants in the Transboundary Gandaki River Basin Raju Rai 1,2,3 , Yili Zhang 1,2,3,4,*, Basanta Paudel 1,3,4 and Narendra Raj Khanal 1,3 1 Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China;
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[email protected] (N.R.K.) 2 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China 3 Kathmandu Center for Research and Education, Chinese Academy of Sciences—Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur, Kathmandu 44613, Nepal 4 CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, Beijing 100101, China * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +86-10-6485-6505; Fax: +86-10-6485-1844 Received: 1 August 2019; Accepted: 23 September 2019; Published: 25 September 2019 Abstract: Farmland abandonment is a common phenomenon worldwide, including in the Gandaki River Basin (GRB) in the central Himalayas. This study examined the status of farmland abandonment, along with its trends and determinants, based primarily on interviews with 639 households in different physiographic regions: Mountain, Hill, Tarai and Gangetic Plain (GP). Binary logistic regression was used to examine the contributions of various factors of farmland abandonment. The results indicate that nearly 48%, 15%, 4%, and 16% of total farmland (khet and bari) in the Mountain, Hill, Tarai and GP regions, respectively, has been abandoned. Such differences in the proportion of farmland abandonment among the regions are mainly due to variations in biophysical conditions, agricultural productivity, access to infrastructure facilities, off-farm employment opportunities, and the occurrence of natural hazards.