Agricultural outlook work benefits agricultural modernization
On the 20th, the Market Early Warning Expert Committee of China's Ministry of Agriculture released the "China Agricultural Outlook 2015-2024," providing outlook and early warning forecasts for the trends in China's agricultural product production, consumption, prices, and trade over the next 10 years. The richness of its content has attracted much attention from all sides.
Carrying out agricultural outlooks and strengthening agricultural information monitoring and early warning is a practical need for China's agriculture to adapt to internationalized, informatized, and market-oriented development. It is a further improvement of China's modern agricultural management system, benefiting agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, and benefiting the advancement of agricultural modernization.
In today's world, the new scientific and technological revolution led by information, network, and communication technologies is profoundly changing the development patterns of traditional industries. Information is increasingly becoming a new type of production factor and an important social asset, and industrial development has ever higher requirements for the quantity and quality of information. Agricultural production is a process combining natural reproduction and economic reproduction, and the agricultural product market has inherent volatility and uncertainty, placing even higher demands on information. Based on this, many countries around the world regard carrying out agricultural outlooks and strengthening agricultural information monitoring and early warning systems as an important part of modern agricultural management methods, so as to better regulate agricultural production and guide the price trends of agricultural product markets.
The Central Rural Work Conference held at the end of last year proposed that we must “unswervingly follow the path of new-type agricultural modernization with Chinese characteristics and accelerate the transformation of agricultural development modes.” Under the new situation, carrying out agricultural outlooks and strengthening agricultural information monitoring and early warning is of great significance for advancing work related to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers and for advancing agricultural modernization.
First, by carrying out agricultural outlooks and advancing agricultural information monitoring and early warning, it helps to deeply study resource and environmental constraints, industrial development bottlenecks, market demand characteristics, and market operation trends, and to fully leverage the role of information in guiding agricultural production; it helps to use market methods to guide and organize agricultural production, coordinate the use of “two types of resources and two markets,” and better safeguard national food security; it helps to advance the transformation of agricultural development modes, continuously optimize the structure of planting and breeding, product structure, and regional structure, realize the transformation of agricultural development from being mainly focused on quantity growth to placing equal emphasis on quantity, quality, and efficiency, and from mainly relying on resources and material inputs to relying on scientific and technological progress and improving the quality of laborers, and comprehensively improve the quality and efficiency of development.
Second, by carrying out agricultural outlooks and advancing agricultural information monitoring and early warning, it helps transform agricultural regulation methods and promote the healthy development of agriculture. Developing modern agriculture must adhere to the principal position of farmers and respect farmers' wishes. This requires government departments to innovate agricultural management methods, and by establishing and improving agricultural information monitoring and early warning systems, coordinate all links including pre-production, mid-production, and post-production, as well as production, circulation, and consumption, conduct forecasting and early warning throughout the entire process of agricultural production and operation, change from passive follow-up management after the fact to proactive guidance and services beforehand, better meet the information needs of agricultural production and operation entities, reduce the blindness of agricultural production and operation decisions, help millions of households connect with the rapidly changing domestic and international markets, alleviate fluctuations in agricultural product market prices, enhance the initiative, foresight, targeting, and coordination of agricultural product market regulation, and cultivate a stable supply capacity oriented toward the market.
In addition, carrying out agricultural outlooks and advancing agricultural information monitoring and early warning can also enhance China's international discourse power in agriculture. Today the world has entered the information age, and information resources, as strategic resources, have become the focus of market competition. Whoever controls information controls the initiative in the market. If China's agriculture is to find a way forward and seek development in the context of globalization in the future, it must accelerate the development and utilization of agricultural information resources. Through mining, organizing, analyzing, forecasting, and releasing information on agricultural product resources, environment, production, supply and demand, and prices, it can give play to the “major country effect” of China's agricultural product production and consumption, enhance discourse power in the international market, and safeguard China's core agricultural interests.