Combating Farmland Degradation and Abandonment: The Rehabilitative Role of High‐Standard Farmland Construction in China

Farmland abandonment, driven by rapid urbanization and rural labor migration, has become a major catalyst for land degradation and threatens agricultural sustainability in China. While the High‐Standard Farmland Construction (HSFC) program was initiated to rehabilitate degraded soils and upgrade agricultural infrastructure, empirical evidence regarding its effectiveness in curbing land abandonment remains limited. Based on a micro‐dataset of 3375 farm households across 10 provinces, this study uses Probit, Tobit, and instrumental variable (IV) models to evaluate the causal impact of HSFC on farmers' abandonment behaviors. Our findings reveal that HSFC participation effectively curtails abandonment, reducing its probability by 6.4% and decreasing the area of abandoned land by 65.4%. Mechanism analysis indicates that these outcomes are achieved primarily by improving soil quality, restoring productive capacity, and re‐incentivizing cultivation. However, the rehabilitative effects are uneven. The program proves most highly effective in vulnerable mountainous terrains, yet its mitigative impact experiences significant temporal decay, declining by approximately 40% 5 years after project completion. This decay highlights a critical flaw in the prevailing “construction over maintenance” approach. To ensure the long‐term sustainability of agricultural lands, policymakers must transition toward sustainable land management frameworks that prioritize ongoing postconstruction maintenance and region‐specific interventions, particularly in ecologically fragile topographies.