Exploring ways to resolve the conflict between farmers' interests and capital's profit-seeking
Light Heat rain is like silver, Great Heat rain is like gold. Right at the height of the hottest “two heats” season, Wuchang City in Heilongjiang Province, bordering the Songnen Plain to the north and adjacent to Shulan and Jiaohe to the south, has welcomed a rare stretch of overcast days. The crops greedily drink the rain, and the increasingly heavy ears of grain wrap up a harvest to look forward to.
Accompanied by the welcome summer rain, the reporter came to Heilongjiang, known as the “Great Granary of China,” to observe up close a transformation of agricultural production relations underway here. The most direct “trigger” of the transformation comes from the inevitable “non-grain” and “non-agricultural” tendencies that arise when industrial and commercial capital treats agriculture as a “piece of Tang Monk's flesh” and rushes in en masse, while the core purpose of the transformation focuses on how to enable the broader farming population to benefit fully from it.
⟦NL> Forced by problems, there is constant thinking and exploration. In recent years, Heilongjiang Province has been exploring how to let farmers who transfer land in and out all fully enjoy the dividends of reform. The method is to vigorously support various new types of operating entities, especially the standardized development of cooperatives. “We have explored and found, and increasingly firmly believe, that the standardized development of farmers' cooperatives is the optimal path for resolving the conflict between the profit-seeking nature of capital and the protection of farmers' interests,” Wang Zhonglin, director of the Heilongjiang Provincial Agricultural Commission, told the reporter. “Cooperatives can successfully handle various complex relationships, such as capital returns and land returns, agricultural efficiency and farmers' efficiency, and benefits for a minority of farmers versus benefits for the majority of farmers.”
Cooperatives are the best path for coordinating capital returns and land returns
——Industrial and commercial capital, with profit as its goal, finds it difficult to discover the value of the land itself. Only farmers know best how to farm, and they can also reduce non-grain and non-agricultural risks. At the same time, under the premise of mechanization assistance and cooperative operation, the scale returns from farmers operating land are equally considerable
In front of Xinghua Mountain on the outskirts of Wuchang City, the quacking calls never cease, and patches of white feathers flash from time to time among the green rice clusters. This is the rice-duck base of the Wangjiatun Modern Agricultural Machinery Cooperative in Wuchang City. Since 2012, the cooperative has experimented with the new planting and breeding model of “rice-duck co-cultivation,” building 46 duck houses in 500 mu of rice fields and raising a total of 9,000 new-breed ducks from the United Kingdom——parrot ducks.
With this method, pesticides and chemical fertilizers are no longer used in the rice fields. Weeding and pest removal rely entirely on the ducks' “help,” and the ducks' droppings are excellent organic fertilizer. “This is a new ‘trick’ of natural agriculture that we farmers figured out ourselves under the guidance of experts,” Qiao Wenzhi, chairman of the cooperative, told the reporter. Visitors who come to see the robust rice and ducks want to buy both rice grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides and ducks that eat only insects and green grass. The cooperative truly has a “double harvest”!
This cooperative, established in 2011, has 635 member households and more than 33,000 mu of member land. In addition to trying “rice-duck co-cultivation,” the cooperative organizes farmers to cultivate carefully, and all other rice fields have achieved organic and ecological planting, among which 10,000 mu of rice fields meet EU organic standards.
Compared with enterprises that enter agriculture “midway,” farmers have deeper feelings for the land. In Heilongjiang, after joining cooperatives with land management rights to form comprehensive operating cooperatives, the use of farmland is still mostly for growing grain, because this is farmers' “strong suit.” Qiao Wenzhi told the reporter: “Take the rice fields that meet EU standards. For weeding we use all manual labor, relying on a ‘human wave tactic’ to pull weeds in a carpet-like sweep. One person does one mu a day. It is very meticulous.”
When mentioning the reason the cooperative was established, one must start with “Wuchang rice.” Everyone knows Wuchang rice is good. Qiao Wenzhi, a farmer born and raised there, had the idea of selling rice years earlier. Clever and well-connected, he sold rice to Beijing. It was very popular the first year, but in the second year he “ran into trouble.” The reason was that the taste had changed, and Qiao Wenzhi then understood that it was caused by different varieties planted by each household. As a result, he was the first to organize farmers into cooperative operation, unifying varieties and management. Farmers nearby who saw the benefits of cooperation subsequently joined the cooperative one after another.
In Niujia Manchu Town, Wuchang City, more than 90 kilometers from Wangjiatun, the establishment of the Fengling Modern Agricultural Machinery Cooperative originated from the alliance of three “Zhuge Liangs.” The town is located in the northern part of China's Northeast Corn Belt, one of the world's three golden corn belts. Liu Yanjie, Chen Zhimin and Wang Xiuwei, the secretaries of the three villages of Xingfu, Zhengfu and Ertun in the town, watched a nearby ordinary farmer learn from the province's advanced model, the Renfa Cooperative, and set up a cooperative that was booming, and they were full of resentment: “The three of us joining forces are not ‘three smelly cobblers,’ but ‘three Zhuge Liangs.’ We will certainly do better than others.”
In 2013, the three villages pooled several thousand mu of land voluntarily transferred by farmers to establish a cooperative. The three village secretaries were all very capable, yet no one “grabbed credit.” In order to achieve scientific management, they elected Bai Yunpeng, a 47-year-old ordinary farmer and “old hand,” as chairman, while the three of them served as directors and supervisors respectively. Today, a total of 1,054 farmer households from the three villages have joined the cooperative, with membership area exceeding 20,000 mu.
Logically, the three villages could have acted alone. Why unite? Bai Yunpeng gave the answer.
“Scale, still scale!” he said. “With more land, our large machinery can all stretch out.” To support the development of agricultural machinery cooperatives, Heilongjiang Province “packaged” the national agricultural machinery purchase subsidy policy, locally called “state investment,” with the invested portion accounting for 60% of the cooperative's purchase of agricultural machinery and tools. “It sounds as if the subsidy is higher than for ordinary farmers, but because the cooperative purchases agricultural machinery and tools uniformly, in actual per-household terms the state subsidy is instead saved,” Bai Yunpeng said. “One household cannot afford and does not need to buy large agricultural machinery and tools, but in a cooperative this becomes possible.”
With large machinery, a sum of money can be saved during operations. Apart from machine depreciation drawn from the cooperative's public reserve fund, only fuel costs and operator wages need to be covered. It is understood that if a farmer individually hires machinery to plow 1 mu of land it costs 30 yuan, but through the cooperative the cost is only a little more than 13 yuan, saving more than half. At the same time, the cooperative's unified bulk purchase of pesticides and fertilizers can also save a considerable amount of money.
In addition, cooperatives find it easier to promote and adopt advanced agricultural techniques, and the use of large machinery provides a foundation for the application of techniques such as “wide-ridge double-row.” For corn planted through the cooperative's specialized and mechanized cultivation, the yield per mu can be more than 200 jin higher than that of ordinary farmers, an increase of more than 10%; ordinary farmers plant more than 37,000 corn plants per mu, while the cooperative can reach about 45,000. When selling grain after autumn, because the grain is concentrated, large in quantity and good in quality, each jin can fetch 3-5 fen more. Calculated this way, each mu of land can increase benefits by more than 300 yuan.
“United, the scale returns of land will emerge,” said Li Lianrui, deputy director of the Heilongjiang Provincial Agricultural Commission. “The comparative benefit of growing grain is low, making it especially suitable for forming cooperatives and promoting farmers' income growth by expanding scale; comparatively, industrial and commercial capital has more advantages entering protected agriculture and cash crop fields.”
Cooperatives are the best vehicle for coordinating agricultural efficiency and farmers' efficiency
——Industrial and commercial capital is naturally strong and takes away most of the benefits when the primary, secondary and tertiary industries are separated, while “small farmers” have weak bargaining power in the face of the “big market.” By organizing farmers through cooperatives, while attracting industrial and commercial enterprises to participate in cooperatives, and with government guidance and support, farmers can “huddle together for warmth” and, with “strong sinews and a sturdy body,” venture into the market and achieve value-added benefits
In the Wangjiatun Cooperative, there is a special member: Jinfutai Agricultural Co., Ltd. Compared with ordinary farmers who contribute land as shares, the company contributes entirely in cash. By the end of last year, the cooperative's total investment was 71.03 million yuan, of which the cash portion was 17.98 million yuan, all invested by Jinfutai.
Speaking of the relationship between the company and the cooperative, Qiao Wenzhi believes: “The company is one and only one member of the cooperative, no different from every household in the village.” The company's main purpose in entering the cooperative is to obtain raw materials of unified standards and superior quality. “From this angle alone, the company depends on the cooperative for its existence.” Why is there no difference between an enterprise entering a cooperative and an ordinary farmer? Wang Zhonglin explained as follows: This is determined by the Cooperative Law. Industrial and commercial capital entering a cooperative must act in accordance with the Cooperative Law. In decision-making, one person has one vote; under special circumstances, additional voting rights may be added through the member assembly, but cannot exceed 20%; in distribution, the cooperative surplus obtained by enterprise investment and funds from other sources cannot exceed 40% of the cooperative's surplus; as for state subsidies to farmers, if the enterprise's legal representative is a farmer then they can enjoy them, and if not a farmer then they cannot; if it is policy funding supporting agriculture, then regardless of whether the legal representative is a farmer, it can be enjoyed. These points are the fundamental differences between industrial and commercial capital entering a cooperative and entering a joint-stock enterprise.
According to Qiao Wenzhi, the cooperative's more than 30,000 mu of organic rice fields uniformly plant a Wuchang rice variety called “Daohuaxiang No. 2.” The use of pesticides and fertilizers adheres to high standards, field weeding is entirely manual, transplanting in the fields adopts a “wide-narrow row” transplanting method, and irrigation uses the “shallow-wet-dry” method, maximizing the organic combination of scientific agronomic techniques with Wuchang's soil, water and air environment to achieve the best growth results and ensure the excellent quality of the rice.
Good quality achieved a good price. Although Wuchang rice is good, in recent years the overall purchase price has hovered at only about 2.5 yuan per jin, which is already more than 60% higher than other Northeast rice. Relying on the high quality obtained through careful cultivation, the Wangjiatun Cooperative sells its own rice to Jinfutai at 8.34 yuan per jin.