Identification and ranking of factors involved in land use change of tea farms (A Case Study of Lakan Region, Rasht County)

Changes in agricultural land use pose serious challenges to rural communities in terms of their food security, self-sufficiency, and sustainable employment with many dire social, cultural, and economic consequences. It is the main goal of this study to identify and rank the factors involved in land use changes of tea farms in Lakan Region, Rasht County, Iran. For this purpose, a comprehensive decision tree was designed to identify the factors involved. Thus, the various criteria and sub-criteria were determined and defined based on previous study results and expert opinions collected from 15 local experts. In the second stage, the factors thus identified were prioritized and their impact intensities determined using Fuzzy Hierarchy Process (FAHP), Spherical Fuzzy Hierarchy Process (SFAHP), and Grey Analytic Hierarchy Process (GAHP). In this regard, a pairwise comparison questionnaire based on the decision tree was designed and administered to 15 experts in order to collect the required information while face-to-face interviews were also conducted. The results showed that the economic factor was the most important drive for the land use change of tea farms. Among the economic sub-criteria, the most important ones involved in land use changes were "shrinking tea farms into more compact sites and reducing their dispersion", "the rising prices of tea farm land plots due to their vicinity to Rasht city and tourist areas", and "low income levels of tea growers" scoring average relative weights of 13.82, 13.59, and 12.05%, respectively, in the three approaches employed. The "legal problems and gap" and "legal supervision and law enforcement" ranked second and third, respectively. It may be concluded that economic and legal criteria must be considered as priority criteria in any program to ban land use change and to preserve the existing tea farms.