Does rural digitalization improve food production security? Evidence from China’s digital village construction policy

Abstract

Food production security (FPS) remains a core challenge for developing economies. Although rural digitalization serves as a fundamental strategy to reshape agricultural systems in developing countries, its impact on food supply resilience remains underexplored. This study investigates the impact of rural digitalization on regional FPS by exploiting China’s Digital Village Construction policy as a quasi-natural experiment. We employ the DID model on a panel dataset comprising 334 prefecture-level cities from 2015 to 2024. The empirical results demonstrate that rural digitalization significantly improves regional FPS. Specifically, the digital intervention increases the FPS of treated cities by an average of 8.2 percent. Regarding the mechanisms, we find that rural digitalization enhances FPS by facilitating smallholders’ food production viability and promoting food-oriented land reallocation. Furthermore, heterogeneity analyses reveal that the impact is more pronounced in regions equipped with superior agricultural socialized services, advanced agricultural industry structures, and major food producing area designations. These findings demonstrate that comprehensive rural digitalization strengthens the resilience of food production systems in developing economies and offer guidance for other Global South countries pursuing similar rural development paradigms.