Why is the unsalable produce problem related to government overreach?

Since the start of summer this year, reports about unsalable agricultural products have once again appeared frequently. From nectarines in a certain northern province to lychees in some southern regions, this should have been a season of bumper harvests, yet farmers are feeling either joy or worry.

Unsalable agricultural products are not only related to natural factors such as severe weather; important human factors also include blindly expanding planting areas, which causes supply to exceed demand, asymmetric supply and demand information, which makes distribution channels sluggish, limited storage capacity, which prevents staggered market launches, and insufficient processing capacity, which makes it difficult to absorb production locally. Of course, as the link between agricultural products and the market, the government's role cannot be ignored.

In many places, to promote the development of a certain agricultural specialty industry, grassroots governments emphasize area over quality and seek scale while neglecting the market, readily building industrial demonstration parks of tens of thousands of mu or industrial demonstration belts of hundreds of thousands of mu. To pursue scale, some places do not hesitate to use large amounts of fiscal funds to subsidize farmers, even providing "one-stop" subsidies from planting to harvest, so that farmers only need to invest labor costs. However, having scale does not equal having an industry, and having products does not equal having a market. If farmers lose cost awareness, they also lose risk awareness. For a time, they rush to follow the trend and plant enthusiastically, but when the crops ripen and pile up at the field edges, the question of who will pay becomes a problem.

Under market economy conditions, producers and sellers are the main players. The government should serve as a good information officer, leveraging its own advantages to analyze and assess market demand information so growers can plant according to demand; it should also serve as a good liaison, enabling sellers and growers to communicate promptly and without barriers, linking scattered market resources together. Only when planting is effectively connected with a series of links such as scientific research, sales, transportation, processing, and storage can an industrial synergy be formed. In addition, the government should also serve as a good service provider, doing good service work for each industrial element. For example, farmers' professional cooperatives are a natural "matchmaker" between enterprises and farmers. They are both a miniature version of an enterprise and farmers who have preliminarily become enterprise-like. With the same funds, supporting cooperatives may bring stronger market competitiveness than separately subsidizing farmers.

In the final analysis, when it comes to matters such as the planting and sale of agricultural products, the government should do some things and not do others. It can neither wash its hands of them nor take on everything. The key is still to act according to market laws.