The agricultural machinery subsidy system lags behind; policy adjustments take time

A major feature of modern agriculture is mechanization. Especially after land is concentrated, the demand for agricultural machinery becomes increasingly urgent. To a certain extent, the state's agricultural machinery subsidies have relieved farmers' financial pressure, but as times develop, the demand for agricultural machinery is also becoming increasingly large-scale and diversified. Without agricultural machinery subsidies, these large grain-growing households feel great pressure. In addition, investment in agricultural infrastructure is still waiting ahead for these large grain-growing households. Can they get over this hurdle? Dang Guoying, an expert on agriculture, rural areas, and farmers and director of the Macroeconomic Office at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes this fully shows that China's agricultural machinery, in terms of the formulation of subsidies and other systems, has a certain lag. Given time, he believes that in the future there will be certain improvements in this regard.

Dang Guoying: The proportion of imported large agricultural machinery in China should still be relatively small. The operating scale of Chinese farmers is not large, so many farmers basically use domestic agricultural machinery. Policies generally take mainstream situations into account. I estimate the problem may lie here, but I believe there will be changes in this regard in the future. Even in international trade negotiations, others will raise this issue. As long as agricultural machinery is purchased, there must not be discriminatory policies, dividing domestic production and foreign production into two policies. In fact, there are now also joint ventures in China, so this situation is somewhat similar to imports. I think policy adjustment needs time.

Dang Guoying believes that large machinery is expensive, and agricultural machinery subsidies, relative to the purchase price, are a drop in the bucket. Subsidies truly for growers should proceed from reality, suit local conditions, and adopt appropriate methods.

Dang Guoying: Local governments can have a certain degree of autonomy and flexibility on this issue. If it is indeed for personal use, rather than obtaining the machinery and then handling it for other purposes, they might as well adopt some flexible methods based on the machinery's efficiency and subsidize him, or based on the efficiency of the machinery he buys, adopt some other forms of subsidy. But there is a very troublesome problem here. What China now advocates is appropriately scaled operation, generally 8-15 times the local existing average scale. In that case, the required efficiency of agricultural machinery would not be as high as I just said. A scale of 3,000 mu is certainly outside the scope of the appropriately scaled operation being advocated. Ordinary farmers cannot reach such a scale, so this is a relatively individual case. I think this matter needs to suit local conditions, and subsidy policies can also be formulated flexibly. At present, this problem is not universal.