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How does the development of leisure agriculture promote increases in farmers' income?
Since the reform and opening up, China's leisure agriculture has gone through the historical stages of emergence, initial development and all-round development. After entering the new century, leisure agriculture has flourished in all regions, showing the characteristics of a steadily expanding industrial scale, continuously enriched development content, increasingly diverse types and models, a
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How should intellectual property protection for biological breeding be strengthened
Biological breeding is a technological innovation activity that uses modern biotechnology to breed new varieties of plants and animals, and is one of the strategic emerging industries spawned by modern biotechnology. Biological breeding is not only related to the future development of the biological industry and the new energy industry, but also concerns food
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How to solidly advance agricultural and livestock development in poor areas
Agriculture and livestock are the basic industries of poor areas. The Ministry of Agriculture has fully leveraged its industry advantages, accurately grasped the key links, persistently driven poverty alleviation and prosperity through industry development, and explored and formed an effective path of poverty alleviation and development. Since the beginning of this year, the Ministry of Agriculture has focused on policy, funding
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How Can Nursery Farmers Avoid Becoming Cannon Fodder for Market Speculation
It is well known that honesty is the foundation of doing business, but in the face of huge economic temptation, there is always a small handful of people who not only take the risk of doing one-off deals themselves, but also stir things up across the whole industry, competing to be the black sheep! The nursery stock industry, as one of the fastest-growing industries in our country,
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How Should China's Agricultural Modernization Path Proceed? Expert Interpretation
According to a report by Voice of the Economy's "CNR Finance Review," today is World Food Day. This year's World Food Day theme is Family Farming: Feeding the World, Caring for the Earth. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has always regarded "food for all" as its sacred mission. Yet surprisingly
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How can China achieve basic grain self-sufficiency? Li Keqiang: Insist on relying on domestic production
Premier Li Keqiang of the State Council visited the headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization on October 15 and delivered a speech. This is the first visit by a Chinese premier to the organization's headquarters since its founding 69 years ago. Li Keqiang said that as China's urbanization accelerates, it is expected that by 2020, 200 million people will have settled in cities and towns from rural areas or found nearby employment in the central and western regions, which requires China to innovate its agricultural production methods, implement innovation based on family-run agriculture, and promote innovation in various forms of agricultural operation. At the same time, it is necessary to accelerate the transfer of rural land management rights and encourage farmers' association and cooperation.
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Correctly understanding agricultural insurance: farmers' willingness to participate has increased year by year
Agricultural insurance is a "green box" policy that the WTO allows countries to use to support agriculture. It is one of the three pillars of modern agricultural development under market economy conditions, and also an important tool for transferring agricultural risks. China began establishing a policy-based agricultural insurance system in 2004
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How Can GMO and Non-GMO Products Compete Fairly
In recent years, the safety of genetically modified food has attracted much public attention. As a new biotechnology, the development path of genetic modification in China has been full of twists and turns. Online, word wars over GMOs erupt one after another, and all kinds of rumors about GM food fill the air
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Rice yields in demonstration zones increase by about 10%, China Academy of Agricultural Sciences technology integration shows results
The China Academy of Agricultural Sciences carried out an integrated experiment on high-yield and high-efficiency comprehensive rice technology this year. During interviews, reporters learned that the experimental results are encouraging, with yields about 10% higher than conventional planting. Chen Mengshan, Party Secretary of the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said that in recent years, the growth rate of China's grain yield per unit area has been declining, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to raise yields.
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How can Chinese agriculture escape the smallholder predicament?
China's smallholder agriculture since the Sui and Tang dynasties. A smallholder refers to an individual farming household that relies entirely or mainly on its own labor to carry out agricultural operations smaller than the scale its labor capacity could handle. Smallholder agriculture refers to the small-scale farming operated by smallholders. According to "A History of China's Land System" by economists Zhao Gang and Chen Zhongyi, during the period from the Qin and Han dynasties to the Northern and Southern dynasties, land relations were not yet strained, and farming households operated 50-60 mu; limited by agricultural technology at the time, households could not cultivate more land, so the scale of agricultural operation matched the farming capacity of the household and was at a reasonable level. By the author's definition, farming households at that time did not yet count as smallholders. After the Sui and Tang dynasties, China's population growth outpaced the increase in cultivated land area, and with improvements in farm tools, fertilization and other agricultural techniques, the human-land relationship began to tighten, and the trend of more people and less land became increasingly obvious. The Tang dynasty implemented the equal-field system, with 65 mu per household as the upper limit, regardless of whether land was left fallow, and farming households often could not reach this upper limit. In the early Northern Song dynasty, the average cultivated land per household was 40 mu. During the Southern Song period, as the population increased, per capita cultivated land fell rapidly, and the vast majority of farming households cultivated less than 25 mu. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, average cultivated land per household gradually decreased even further. By 1936, average cultivated land per household was only 18.4 mu, and per capita cultivated land for farmers was 3.6 mu. It can be said that only after the Sui and Tang dynasties did China's farming households come to be called smallholders, and smallholder agriculture began to take shape.</p> <p> After the founding of New China, with population growth and advances in agricultural technology, the human-land relationship became even more strained, and the scale of smallholder operations became even smaller. At present, the average cultivated land per household in China is only 7.5 mu, equivalent to 1/40 of the European Union and 1/400 of the United States, and less than 1/2 of Japan and South Korea. Therefore, Chinese agriculture is a typical smallholder agriculture below the reasonable level of the human-land relationship. In addition, land plots are fragmented, with 7-8 plots per household on average, each plot averaging only about 1 mu; many farming households in Guangxi and elsewhere have a dozen or twenty-plus plots, most of them only a few tenths of a mu, so land management is especially highly small-scale and dispersed.</p> <p> Accordingly, the author's view is that from the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties to the present, over a thousand years, the scale of farming household operations has gradually fallen to an economically increasingly unreasonable low level; households are capable of cultivating far more than they actually cultivate, the surplus agricultural labor force has gradually increased, farming households have become typical smallholders, and agriculture has become typical smallholder agriculture.</p> <p> <strong> The "smallholder predicament"</strong></p> <p> Relying on intensive smallholder agriculture, China has always fed the world's largest population. But it cannot be denied that China has many people and little land, the human-land contradiction is prominent, and the scale of agricultural operation is too small, making it economically unreasonable. Smallholder agriculture with less than 10 mu per household is below a reasonable scale of agricultural operation, resulting in a large surplus of labor, low agricultural production efficiency, and increased agricultural production costs per unit area for cultivation, harvesting, fertilizing and spraying. Smallholder agriculture is also not conducive to the use of advanced agricultural machinery and equipment, restricts improvements in agricultural production efficiency, and narrows the space for agricultural production returns. Taking grain-growing households as an example, the single-season return from one mu of land is about 200 yuan; calculated at an average of 7.5 mu per household, the return is less than 2,000 yuan. If labor costs are priced at market rates, then working in agriculture amounts to self-employment, and agricultural returns amount to wage income. The author believes that China's smallholder agriculture has fallen into a "smallholder low-level development predicament", or "smallholder predicament" for short, meaning that smallholder agriculture is "low-profit agriculture" (even "no-profit agriculture"): not only is the return per unit area low, but because the operating scale is small, total returns are also low; low returns in turn limit the capacity for agricultural investment and reduce enthusiasm for investment, leading to slow application of agricultural technology and extensive cultivation or even abandonment of land. Smallholder agriculture has low output, low efficiency, low returns and low input, a low-level cycle that is difficult to move toward modernization.</p> <p> In modern society, the commodity attributes of agricultural products have become increasingly obvious; besides meeting their own needs, the agricultural products produced by smallholders must also be sold on the market, and smallholder agriculture is inevitably affected by domestic and international agricultural product markets. Especially in the wave of agricultural globalization, smallholders find it difficult to "keep to themselves" as in traditional agriculture; their production, demand, prices and returns are all deeply affected by world agriculture. In recent years, domestic grain prices have continued to be higher than international market prices, and the own predicament of smallholders and smallholder agriculture has been intensified by pressure from the international market. The "smallholder predicament" is like a huge boulder holding back the pace of China's modern agriculture.</p> <p> <strong> From smallholders to family farms: the path out of the "smallholder predicament"</strong></p> <p> The important difference between smallholders and family farms lies in the difference in operating scale. If a farming household's operating scale is smaller than its labor and management capacity, it is a smallholder; if larger than its labor and management capacity, it is a family farm. A small operating scale is the main characteristic of smallholders and also the main cause of the "smallholder predicament". Once the operating scale of a farming household reaches a reasonable level matching its labor force and management capacity, the smallholder moves toward a family farm, the agricultural operating situation improves, and agricultural income increases and becomes comparable to non-agricultural employment income. Taking grain production as an example, survey and calculation data from the Ministry of Agriculture show that under current production conditions, a sown area of 100-120 mu is the scale standard distinguishing smallholders from family farms. According to research by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, only an agricultural operating scale of no less than 170 mu for cash crops and no less than 300 mu for grain crops is internationally competitive. For a period in the future, both family farms and smallholders will be the main actors in China's agricultural operations, but family farms operated by professional farmers above the moderate scale are the vehicle for Chinese agriculture to escape the "smallholder predicament" and the direction for smallholder agriculture to be thoroughly transformed.</p> <p> At present, China has gradually acquired the economic and social conditions for moderate-scale operation, and moderate-scale land operation will become inevitable. The prerequisite for scale land operation is the transfer of surplus agricultural labor to the secondary and tertiary industries and the achievement of full employment in non-agricultural industries. Countries around the world generally take the stable transfer of 60%-70% of the agricultural labor force into non-agricultural industries as the starting condition for agricultural scale operation. Most developed countries have relied on gradually concentrating land to achieve agricultural scale operation and thereby achieve agricultural modernization. With the acceleration of urbanization and industrialization, the declining share of the rural labor force engaged in agriculture will become increasingly obvious. In 2012, China's total number of migrant workers exceeded 260 million, of whom more than 160 million worked away from home. There are about 150 million new-generation migrant workers, who basically do not know how to farm and will not make a living from farming in the future. In the long run, they have the possibility of breaking away from agriculture and from the land. In the developed coastal areas of eastern China, the inner suburbs of some large and medium-sized cities, and some areas of the central and western regions where large numbers of agricultural laborers go out to work, the conditions for moderate-scale land operation already exist. By the end of 2013, the area of contracted cultivated land transferred in China had reached 340 million mu, accounting for 26% of the national contracted cultivated land area. According to Ministry of Agriculture statistics, by the end of 2012, the country's 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities (excluding Xizang) had a total of 877,000 family farms, accounting for less than 1% of the total number of farming households, with an operated cultivated land area of 176 million mu, an average operating scale of 200 mu, and 13.4% of the national contracted cultivated land area.</p> <p> Formulating a family farm development strategy and cultivating family farms is an important path to promoting the development of modern agriculture. In recent years, Jiangxi province, Jiangsu province, Hunan province, Suzhou city and some other areas have issued special fiscal subsidy policies to promote moderate-scale operation. At the central level, on the basis of drawing on local experience, special guiding documents to promote moderate-scale operation can be drafted, encouraging localities to support moderate-scale agricultural operation and family farm development on the premise of adhering to the basic rural operating system and protecting farmers' land rights and interests. Subsidy and support policies for family farms and smallholders (ordinary farming households) should mainly treat them equally, but there should be preferential policies for smallholders growing into family farms. It is suggested that national agricultural subsidies and agricultural development projects establish special programs to support agricultural scale operation entities. The central finance, agriculture, comprehensive agricultural development and other departments can, on the basis of existing policies, formulate and issue subsidies and projects specifically guiding and supporting agricultural scale operation and family farms. Through policy support, break the "smallholder low-level development predicament", guide moderate-scale agricultural operation, and create the basic conditions for realizing agricultural modernization. It must be emphasized that the move from smallholders to family farms is a gradual process; farmers must not be forced or induced to transfer land simply in pursuit of agricultural operating scale, and family farms must not be pieced together simply by lumping together and building up large households.</p> <p> </p>
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