How to prevent the "cake" of agricultural benefits from being repeatedly devoured by "flies"

Since 2004, the “No. 1 Central Document” has focused on the “three rural issues” for 12 consecutive years, and agricultural benefit subsidies have increased substantially. Funds and resources have flowed into rural grassroots areas, but with the supervision mechanism still not sufficiently sound, duty-related crimes involving agriculture-related funds, assets and resources are relatively numerous, and in recent years news of village officials embezzling 70 or 80 million yuan, or even over 100 million yuan, has repeatedly appeared in the newspapers.

In recent years, with the rapid advancement of China's urbanization and the comprehensive rollout of the socialist new countryside construction, the state's investment in special agricultural benefit funds has increased year by year, covering every aspect of the national economy and people's livelihood. However, in actual practice, because agricultural benefit funds are scattered across many points and wide areas, come from many funding channels, and have thick and long fund chains, not only do they involve various industries and fields, but also, due to the lack of an effective supervision mechanism, problems such as fund retention, interception, misappropriation and diversion are prone to occur. The duty-related crime fields involved have also become diversified, seriously affecting the prestige of the Party and the government, the harmony of cadre-mass relations and economic and social stability.

⟦NL> As is well known, the state's agricultural benefit subsidy funds can be called the welfare “cake” of the rural masses. The types of subsidies involved are numerous, including grain subsidies, agricultural machinery subsidies, subsidies for returning farmland to forest, as well as rural minimum living allowances, social security and poverty alleviation funds. These agricultural benefit “cakes” can all become targets for grassroots cadres to profit from. From village cadres to township cadres, the “flies” all have their own ways of sharing in the agricultural benefit “cake”: plucking a feather at every pass, so that 10,000 yuan approved ends up as only 5,000 in the farmers' hands; demanding a “kickback,” having villagers bring a chicken to their door before Spring Festival... These various chaotic practices have severely damaged the implementation of agricultural benefit policies in rural areas, affected rural social stability, and drawn widespread criticism from the public.

It is true that all localities have been making great efforts to address the problem of “fly corruption,” but the chaos of rural grassroots cadres “sharing” the agricultural benefit “cake” has always been difficult to eliminate. The reason for this, on the surface, is that some areas have loopholes in the payment and management of agriculture-related funds, giving lawbreakers an opportunity; the root causes lie mainly in two aspects: first, Party discipline, administrative discipline and the law provide weak supervision over rural grassroots cadres, causing power to spin out of control; second, these grassroots cadres have a weak sense of legality and cannot correctly view the power in their hands.

Therefore, the author believes that to fundamentally cure the chaos of the agricultural benefit “cake” being repeatedly shared by “flies,” it is necessary to address both the symptoms and the root causes and to adopt a multi-pronged approach -- build a deterrent defense line and “treat the symptoms” by strictly investigating and cracking down on agriculture-related corruption; tighten the red line of prevention and control and “treat the source” by strengthening supervision and plugging loopholes in village affairs management; and keep the ideological defense line taut and “treat the root cause” by enhancing grassroots cadres' awareness of integrity and self-discipline through education and training, and strengthening integrity risk prevention and control.