Modern agriculture cannot develop without financial service innovation
"For a long time, due to factors such as high risk and long benefit cycles, the difficulty and high cost of financing for agriculture, rural areas and farmers has become a commonplace problem. Constrained by this, it is difficult to expand the scale of agriculture and to renew equipment and technology, which seriously restricts the process of our country's agricultural modernization." Recently, at the "2015 Modern Agriculture Emerging Industries and Financial Services Innovation Development Forum" held in Beijing, relevant experts held that modern agriculture development urgently calls for financial service innovation.
This forum, hosted by the High-Tech Agriculture Professional Committee of the Chinese Association of Agricultural Science Societies, took "New Agriculture, New Technology, New Finance, New Culture" as its theme. Hundreds of people committed to the development of the high-tech agriculture industry from across the country, including entrepreneurs, economists, bank executives, financial service institutions and large-scale growers, gathered together to discuss modern agriculture development and financial service innovation.
Around the national "13th Five-Year Plan", participants conducted in-depth discussions on transforming the agricultural development model, adjusting and optimizing the industrial structure, promoting innovation-driven development, and accelerating the pace of agricultural modernization; deepening rural financial reform and innovation, and promoting ecological finance and agriculture-benefiting finance; accelerating the connection between the agricultural industry and financial services, and advancing capital market services for modern agriculture.
In recent years, as state-owned commercial banks have gradually withdrawn and merged business institutions below the county level, rural financial service carriers have been greatly reduced, and phenomena such as financial "blind spots" have generally existed. Traditional finance can no longer meet the growing rural economic demand for multi-level, inclusive financial services.
"People engaged in agriculture lack financial service support, and few of those engaged in finance understand agriculture and rural areas." Liu Zhiren, a counsellor of the Counsellors' Office of the State Council, said at the forum that the overall development of rural finance in our country is currently not satisfactory. Although policy banks and commercial banks have issued many rural financial policies, overall there are many restrictions and little help. Liu Zhiren held that accelerating the promotion of rural financial service innovation has become an important issue that must be resolved for the realization of the "13th Five-Year Plan" agriculture and rural goals.
Zou Pingzuo, chief researcher of the Research Bureau of the People's Bank of China, held that developing internet agricultural finance is one way to innovate rural financial services, using a model that combines funds, securities and the internet to support agricultural transformation and upgrading. Asymmetric credit is the biggest problem in the financing of agriculture, rural areas and farmers in our country. The foundation of finance is credit, and the foundation of credit is property rights. Zou Pingzuo also said that with the acceleration of the reasonable positioning of the three rights of rural land in our country, the securitization and creditization potential of rural land will be released, and the difficulty of financing for agriculture, rural areas and farmers is expected to be alleviated.