Can digital technology promote sustainable agriculture? Empirical evidence from urban China

In the face of increasing global unsustainable risks such as poverty, hunger, and pollution. Building sustainable agriculture (SA) in the digital age is a fundamental task for human survival. Based on the coupled coordination perspective, this paper constructs an SA system that takes into account more stakeholders by considering poverty alleviation and income increase (PI), food security (FS), and green agriculture (GA) as subsystems. The impact of digital technology on SA is systematically analyzed through data from 276 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2005 to 2020. The study shows that digital technology has a significant upgrading effect on SA and its subsystems. And digital technology is more likely to promote SA in the developed eastern region and peripheral cities. Moreover, agricultural productivity and labor productivity play a mediating mechanism in the process of digital technology for SA. Digital financial inclusion fuels the high input process of digital technology for incentivizing SA, PI, and GA, but it cannot affect the highly technical process of digital farming. Further research found that the incentives of digital technology for SA and GA are characterized by the nonlinear characteristic of increasing marginal effects. Due to the second digital divide, there is a U-shaped incentive process of digital technology for PI to fall and then rise. Finally, the spillover nature of digital technology leads to spatial spillovers in its contribution to SA development.