Fake and substandard agricultural supplies are targeting left-behind elderly people - how can we prevent this?

Recently, Hongze County in Jiangsu heard a case involving fake and substandard agricultural supplies that cheated and harmed farmers. The criminal suspect is suspected of the crime of producing and selling substandard pesticides, mixing chemical fertilizer with water to make fake pesticides and boasting them as a “special-effect medicine” that could treat rice blast, selling them specifically to defraud left-behind elderly people. This caused more than 3000 mu of rice in the county to suffer yield reductions or total crop failure due to disease, resulting in direct economic losses of several million yuan.

As large numbers of young and middle-aged laborers go out to work, more and more left-behind elderly people are engaged in grain production, and farming is their main source of income. Because their level of

education is not high and their awareness of safeguarding their rights is insufficient, left-behind elderly people repeatedly become targets of fraud. In this incident, the lawbreakers' actions not only disrupted the agricultural supplies market, but also made the already difficult lives of left-behind elderly people “even worse,” which is truly infuriating.

To prevent fake and substandard agricultural supplies from targeting left-behind elderly people, on the one hand, industry and commerce departments must strictly enforce market access, strengthen supervision, crack down on illegal acts, and strengthen industry self-discipline; on the other hand, agricultural technology extension departments must also popularize knowledge about pesticide and fertilizer use for left-behind elderly people and enhance their ability to distinguish genuine from fake. In addition, appropriately scaled operation methods such as land trusteeship, shareholding, or transfer can also serve as a fundamental solution to prevent left-behind elderly people from being cheated.