Evaluation of Agricultural Ecological Security in Hubei Province

With the promotion of agricultural ecological civilization construction in China, agricultural ecological security has received increasing attention. How to ensure agricultural ecological security has become a great concern for many scholars. As an important agricultural province in China, Hubei is of great significance to Chinese food security and agricultural sustainable development. This paper aims to establish an index system of agricultural ecological security and security classification of Hubei via Analytic Hierarchy Process and Pressure-State-Response methods. An evaluation of agricultural ecological security in Hubei, with a base of the national average value in 2015, reveals that the security degree has increased by 0.07566 from 0.90150 in 2005 to 0.97716 in 2015. Results show that agricultural ecological security in Hubei has improved but failed to reach the national average and there is still large space for improvement of the security level, considering a trend of deterioration in some indexes, such as per capita water resources, population density, per unit area pesticide load of farmland, forest coverage, grassland degradation rate and average annual precipitation. Influencing factors, especially population spatial distribution, misconduct in agricultural production, insufficient ability in agricultural natural disaster prevention, deficiency of agro-ecological technology of agricultural ecological security in Hubei are analyzed. For improvement of the degree of agricultural ecological security in Hubei, some countermeasures and suggestions are discussed.