A retirement system for professional farmers will be gradually established

Recently, a "2014 National Report on the Current Situation of Rural Elderly Care in China" showed that 54.6% of rural elderly are still engaged in occupational labor, and more than 60% of rural elderly do not like to move to the city for elderly care, resulting in a situation of being “forced to stay behind.” (According to the People's Daily of June 10)

The Constitution stipulates that citizens have the right to obtain material assistance from the state and society when they are old, ill, or have lost the ability to work. The state develops social insurance, social relief, and medical and health undertakings that citizens need to enjoy these rights. Although farmers work hard in farming, they cannot “gloriously retire” at the age of 60 like urban residents, enterprise employees, and staff of administrative and public institutions. It should be said that the government and society have done a lot of work on the issue of elderly care for farmers. For example, farmers who reach the age of 60 can receive a certain amount of “pension” each month; another example is encouraging farmers to pay social insurance, and so on. These are meant to ensure that farmers have support and reliance in old age.

In my opinion, as the country's strength grows and rural economic and social development progresses, a retirement system for professional farmers should be gradually established. Establishing a retirement system for professional farmers and strengthening the institutional guarantee for professional farmers' elderly care is a successful experience of advanced developed countries in promoting the professionalization of farmers. For example, Germany established a retirement system for farmers in 1957. As Wang Fuyu, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and chairman of the Guizhou Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said, it is necessary to innovate the social security system, bring the rural population uniformly into the urban medical insurance, pension insurance, unemployment insurance, and other social security systems, integrate policy resources such as old-age subsidies, rural minimum living security, and “five guarantees” support, refer to the social security standards for employees of industrial enterprises, formulate and issue public policies, and establish a social security mechanism for professional farmers with pension insurance as the core nationwide, so that farmers who reach the age of 60 withdraw from agricultural production and operation, and the government issues pensions according to the actual needs of elderly care, changing the family-based and land-based elderly care models, so that the elderly care issue for professional farmers receives institutional guarantees.

In fact, some Western developed countries formulated comprehensive retirement systems for elderly farmers long ago, with France being the most typical example. After World War II, the French government formulated a land reorganization policy and accelerated land concentration through means such as establishing “land consolidation and rural enterprise companies.” In the 1970s, the French government made the decision to issue lifelong pensions to farmers, prompting 440,000 elderly farmers to leave agriculture; this alone concentrated more than 9 million hectares of land, equivalent to 1/4 of all agricultural land. Later, through a series of policies, France also achieved relatively rapid development of rural social welfare undertakings, one of which was implementing a pension system for elderly farmers. Taiwan, China, also has an “elderly farmer allowance,” namely a welfare allowance for elderly farmers, which can be simply understood as a pension for farmers. Its recipients are elderly farmers in Taiwan who have reached the age of 65. In 2011, the Taiwan authorities finally passed a plan to adjust the elderly farmer allowance every four years according to the CPI, making the elderly farmer allowance institutionalized. At the same time, the conditions and recipients for applying for the “elderly farmer allowance” were relaxed, and elderly fishermen were also included as recipients.

Establishing a “farmer retirement system” has many positive effects on the economy and society. First, it can greatly enhance the cohesion and appeal of the collective; second, the retirement of elderly farmers provides jobs for newly added labor, improving the age, education, and technical quality of the labor force; finally, to a certain extent, it breaks the old concept of “raising sons to provide for old age.” Among these, the most important point is solving the problems of “who will farm the land” and “how to farm the land.” At present, elderly people farming in rural areas has become a common phenomenon, but at least there are still people farming. The real danger is that when today's farmers grow old and can no longer farm, “who will farm the land” then? Therefore, establishing a farmer retirement system should be used as an entry point to guide traditional identity-based farmers to become “respectable” professional farmers, establish the same occupational guarantees and retirement system as other occupations, attract more people to engage in agriculture, and ultimately realize the transformation of China's traditional agriculture.