Ensuring food security and promoting sustainable agricultural development have emerged as global strategic priorities. Promoting the decoupling between grain production and carbon emissions (GCD) to achieve cleaner grain production represents a critical pathway for addressing these challenges. Although academic research has explored the relationship between food security and agricultural carbon mitigation, the mechanism through which land certification facilitates cleaner grain production remains inadequately revealed. This study investigates China's rural land certification program(LCP), which is the largest land tenure reform in the world, as a policy framework. Based on panel data from 231 prefecture-level cities in China between 2012 and 2022, this study employs a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) approach to systematically evaluate the causal effects of LCP on the GCD. Empirical results demonstrate that LCP significantly promotes GCD, a conclusion that remains robust across various checks. Mechanism analysis reveals dual transmission pathways: first, the policy reduces transaction costs to facilitate land transfer and labor migration, thereby generating economies of scale; second, it strengthens supply-demand matching efficiency in agricultural outsourcing services, creating economies of specialization. The synergistic interaction of these mechanisms further optimizes production factor allocation and accelerates the decoupling process. This research contributes to following dimensions: enhancing the accounting framework for carbon emissions in grain production, expanding the environmental impact assessment of land property rights systems, and strengthening the theoretical understanding of GCD. Furthermore, it provides an operational policy paradigm for developing countries to coordinate food security with low-carbon transition through property rights reform, offering valuable insights for improving global climate governance systems.
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