Solid progress made in building a nationwide comprehensive service platform for agriculture, rural areas and farmers

Such an organization was once just “a carrying pole with two baskets, hauling goods on its shoulders around the mountains”, yet it took root in rural areas over the long term, stayed close to farmers, and built a bridge linking the Party and the government with farmers.

For more than 60 years, the supply and marketing cooperative system has connected the countryside at one end and the cities at the other, serving production on one side and driving consumption on the other, promoting and witnessing the transformation of rural areas from a planned economy to a market economy, and providing an endless stream of momentum for the prosperity and development of the rural economy.

The practice of more than 30 years of reform and development in China's rural areas has proven that supply and marketing cooperatives are an important bridge and bond that keeps the Party and the government closely connected with farmers, and they have advantages and roles that other economic organizations cannot replace. At present, deepening the comprehensive reform of supply and marketing cooperatives is an important part of comprehensively deepening rural reform, and is an inevitable requirement for innovating mechanisms and systems, increasing development vitality, and improving service capacity.

The Central Committee issued the "Decision on Deepening the Comprehensive Reform of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives" just as comprehensively deepening rural reform entered a critical year, profound changes were taking place in agricultural production and operation, appropriately scaled operations were developing steadily, farmers' living needs were upgrading at a faster pace, and there was an urgent need to build a comprehensive organization serving agriculture with Chinese characteristics and to deepen the comprehensive reform of supply and marketing cooperatives. As China's economic development enters a new normal, how to advance the process of agricultural modernization under the “double squeeze” of prices and costs and under hard constraints on resources and the environment is a major issue and challenge at present. The supply and marketing cooperative system has a relatively complete organizational system, a relatively sound business network, and relatively complete service functions, and it can fully display its talents in many areas, including innovating the methods and means of agricultural production services, raising the level of agricultural product circulation services, and carrying out rural cooperative financial services. It can become a backbone force for advancing agricultural modernization, promoting farmers' income growth and prosperity, and promoting the realization of a moderately prosperous rural society in all respects.

At present, the development of supply and marketing cooperatives still faces many challenges: their cooperative relationship with farmers is not close enough, their comprehensive service strength needs to be improved, their hierarchical ties are relatively loose, and their systems have not been fully straightened out. If these problems are not solved, supply and marketing cooperatives will not be able to adapt to the development of the market economy, meet the needs of urban-rural integration, or promote agricultural modernization. It is necessary to further stimulate internal momentum and development vitality through deepening comprehensive reform, better leverage their unique advantages in developing modern agriculture, promoting farmers' prosperity, and prospering the urban and rural economy, and take on greater responsibilities.

To deepen the comprehensive reform of supply and marketing cooperatives, it is necessary to adhere to the fundamental purpose of serving agriculture, strengthen the mechanism linking grassroots cooperatives with farmers' interests, and establish and improve a distribution system that combines rebates based on transaction volume with dividends based on shares. Through various channels such as labor cooperation, capital cooperation, and land cooperation, supply and marketing cooperatives can drive the broad masses of farmers to participate in the market process. It is necessary to truly achieve farmers' investment, farmers' participation, and farmers' benefit, so that urban and rural residents, especially the broad masses of farmers, continuously gain a stronger “sense of gain” from the reform.

Deepening the comprehensive reform of supply and marketing cooperatives is an indispensable and important part of comprehensively deepening rural reform. The No. 1 Central Document of 2015 emphasized comprehensively deepening the comprehensive reform of supply and marketing cooperatives, adhering to the direction of serving agriculture, focusing on advancing the transformation of grassroots cooperatives, innovating the governance mechanism of federations of cooperatives, expanding the areas of service to agriculture, and building supply and marketing cooperatives into a backbone force for providing comprehensive services for “agriculture, rural areas and farmers” nationwide. The "Decision on Deepening the Comprehensive Reform of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives" issued by the Central Committee further made related arrangements. It is hoped that the supply and marketing cooperative system will, in accordance with the requirements of the "Decision", strive to build itself into a cooperative economic organization system and strive to create a nationwide comprehensive platform serving “agriculture, rural areas and farmers” with closer ties between supply and marketing cooperation and farmers, more complete agricultural service functions, and more efficient market-oriented operation.