Carrying Forward the Ecological Agriculture Tradition to Safeguard China's Food Security
[Editor's Note]Ecological agriculture has become a fashionable term nowadays. When it is mentioned, people always think of developed countries such as those in Europe and America, and the concept of ecological agriculture has become a foreign import. In fact, China's traditional agriculture also deserves the label of ecological. This article points out that as early as a century ago, the American scholar F.H. King, in his book Farmers of Forty Centuries, took the standpoint of a Westerner and called the traditional agriculture of Eastern countries, including China, “permanent agriculture”, while labeling the agriculture characterized by chemical fertilizers, pesticides and machinery that emerged after the modern Western Industrial Revolution as petroleum agriculture and chemical agriculture. Ecological agriculture is an indispensable component of the next stage of modern agricultural development, and China can carry forward this tradition of its own and develop a style of its own in modern agricultural development.
China's traditional agriculture once created miracles in terms of yield per unit area and the population it supported. As early as the period of traditional agricultural technology, the population that Chinese agriculture, with its limited land resources, could feed already amazed the world. China's population grew from more than 20 million during the Warring States period to 300 to 400 million before the Opium War, and traditional agriculture basically met the needs of this enormous population growth. Even today we are still proud that China feeds 1/4 of the world's population with less than 7% of the world's cultivated land. Moreover, over several thousand years, while China's land maintained continuously rising utilization rates and productivity, the soil fertility basically did not decline, and much of the land became more fertile the more it was cultivated. All of this can only be called a miracle in the history of world agriculture.
Whether Chinese agriculture today can continue these miracles and ensure national food security requires not only the rational development of modern agricultural management methods and modern agricultural technology, but also the inheritance of the rational elements of traditional agricultural technology through innovation in farmer organization. As early as a century ago, the American scholar F.H. King, in his book Farmers of Forty Centuries, took the standpoint of a Westerner and called the traditional agriculture of Eastern countries, including China, “permanent agriculture”. Today more and more people believe that China's traditional agriculture is circular agriculture and ecological agriculture, while the agriculture characterized by chemical fertilizers, pesticides and machinery that emerged after the modern Western Industrial Revolution is called petroleum agriculture and chemical agriculture. Ecological agriculture is an indispensable component of the next stage of modern agricultural development, and China can carry forward this tradition of its own and develop a style of its own in modern agricultural development.
⟦NL> From the perspective of economic rationality, modern agricultural development generally seeks economies of scale. However, if viewed from the comprehensive social and economic benefits required for sustainable development, the more large-scale and modern the crop farming and livestock farming, the more serious the pollution they cause. Especially under the conditions of China's shortage of land resources and the diversified food demands of residents, blindly copying the model of pursuing agricultural economies of scale through large-scale production can only result in a further strengthening of chemical agriculture. Therefore, consideration should be given to drawing on the tradition of China's ecological circular agriculture, developing agricultural production of an appropriate scale, and promoting the sustainable development of agriculture.
1. Conduct scientific systematization and technological innovation of the ecological agriculture tradition As for the inheritance of traditional agricultural production techniques, due to the lack of systematic summarization, improvement and innovation, under conditions of increasing scarcity of production resources such as land, they cannot very well create both economic and ecological benefits. Many traditional agricultural production techniques need modern science to explain their mechanisms, improve their operations, and make them standardized and precise, so as to facilitate their promotion over a wider area.
For example, the rice-field duck-raising production method created in China on the basis of “using ducks to control locusts” was originally a very valuable agricultural ecological technique, yet it has always been left to fend for itself, without the summarization and promotion it deserves, and instead the ecological technique of “rice-duck symbiosis” was introduced from abroad. Another example is China's traditional farmyard manure technique. Although it embodies the concept of a circular economy that turns waste into resources, due to backward collection and processing methods, it is highly prone to drawbacks such as low nutrient content and large volume of organic fertilizer, low degree of harmlessness and heavy pollution, and low labor efficiency and high intensity. When farmers compare the costs in all respects, they naturally tend to use chemical fertilizers.
2. Pass on ecological agriculture techniques by developing appropriately scaled farming households and organizing farmers The reason China developed a technical tradition of ecological agriculture is related to its resource and environmental endowment of many people and little land, and also to farmers farming for generations and passing it on through family inheritance and the dissemination by agronomists. If China does not abandon household management in agricultural production, then it can be envisioned that the tradition of China's ecological agriculture can still be further passed on under the village community's forms of residence and land tenure, playing an immeasurable role.
Ecological agriculture techniques are highly dependent on specific ecosystems; they are very specific and practical, which requires that farmers cultivating a piece of land be able to farm for the long term, and preferably pass on agricultural techniques through family generations to reduce learning costs. Farming households must have an appropriate scale of land management, need to become professional farmers, and live in rural areas for the long term, so as to possess the operational capacity and capacity for learning and innovation in ecological agriculture techniques.
At the same time, the ecological cultivation of a single household depends on a specific ecosystem within a certain geographical area. To maintain and develop ecological agriculture, there must be a certain plan for soil improvement, water conservancy guarantees, seed selection and field management within a specific area. This requires that neighboring farmers must belong to an organized group, whether this group is a regional cooperative or a collective economic organization. In other words, only with a certain degree of farmer organization can the tradition of ecological agriculture be guaranteed to be passed on.
In order for ecological agriculture to develop, farmers must also develop the ability to compete in the market with similar agricultural products that have low production costs abroad. Under the conditions of an open international agricultural products market, the state must give priority to ensuring the supply of domestically produced ecological food grain varieties for its residents' food grain, accordingly impose certain restrictions on imports of foreign grain, and also give certain price subsidies to domestic ecological grain.