Land Transfer Cannot Be Forced to Grow by Pulling Up Seedlings: Agricultural Transformation Requires Steady Progress

At present, China's agriculture is in a critical period of accelerated transformation. Whether traditional agriculture can smoothly achieve the leap to modern agriculture depends to a large extent on whether the process of land transfer and appropriately scaled management can advance steadily and in an orderly manner. With the successive introduction of policies to accelerate land transfer, rural land transfer and appropriately scaled management are ushering in a period of accelerated development.

However, due to the existence of a series of complex constraining factors, in the process of advancing land transfer, we must not “pull up seedlings to help them grow.” We must pay close attention to protecting the interests of hundreds of millions of farmers, pay close attention to supporting new types of agricultural business entities, and pay close attention to appropriately adjusting agricultural support policies.

Land contractual management rights belong to farmers, and whether land is transferred should be decided independently by the contracted farming households. On the one hand, simplified administrative means cannot be used to advance land transfer and appropriately scaled management, and the process of advancing land transfer and appropriately scaled management must not evolve into the deprivation of farmers' land rights and interests by other entities with interests. On the other hand, advancing land transfer and appropriately scaled management cannot simply adopt a “low-level ossification” model. A large number of surveys show that “long-term leasing, fixed rent, annual payment” is still the main model of land transfer at present. Although calculating rent according to the physical price of the current year basically ensures the security of returns from transferred land, it is difficult for farmers to fully participate in the process of scaled agricultural management. In the process of promoting land transfer, greater attention should be paid to protecting farmers' principal position, and more attention and support should be given to explorations of land transfer methods such as guaranteed minimum dividends.

⟦NL> At present, the drawbacks of smallholder farming in China are becoming increasingly prominent, and the need to change traditional agricultural management methods is becoming stronger and stronger. At the same time, profit-driven industrial and commercial capital is entering agriculture and entering rural areas. In some rural areas, the model of corporate agriculture has developed rapidly. International experience proves that the corporate agriculture model is difficult to sustainably and efficiently promote agricultural development. Developing modern agriculture must take as its main body farmers who take agriculture as their profession and rural society as their basic living space. Therefore, the development of modern agriculture in China should neither take the decline of farmers as its cost nor simply exclude the entry of agricultural enterprises; it is bound to be a development trend of mixed management.

Therefore, in the process of advancing land transfer and appropriately scaled management, on the one hand, we should give play to the comparative advantages of agricultural enterprises in areas such as resource integration, technology absorption, and quality control, and support appropriate development of agricultural enterprises in fields suited to them. It is necessary to determine suitable standards for land scale management in each region based on factors such as the natural and economic conditions of different regions, the transfer of rural labor, and the level of agricultural mechanization, so as to prevent agricultural enterprises from one-sidedly pursuing scale. On the other hand, we should give play to the leading role of new types of agricultural business entities. Although the scale of land transferred by new entities such as specialized large households, family farms, and farmers' professional cooperatives is relatively small, their interest relationships with farmers are more stable and closer, and their demonstrative role and driving force for surrounding farmers in areas such as the promotion of new technologies and market development are stronger.

It should be recognized that land transfer and appropriately scaled management are not simply a process of optimizing the allocation of the land factor; they will also bring about expanded demand for agricultural production factors such as agricultural technology, agricultural machinery, and service systems, as well as changes in supply methods. In the process of promoting appropriately scaled agricultural management, some previous ways of supporting agriculture through policy have shown increasing incompatibility. At present, the most important adjustment to agricultural support policies is to accelerate the construction and improvement of a policy support system for new types of business entities. In terms of improving agricultural production infrastructure conditions, improving the mortgage financing function of land management rights, and strengthening the ability to resist risks, more targeted policy support should be given to specialized large households, family farms, farmers' cooperatives, and others that are more rational in scale and have greater practical driving force.