When Will China's Professional Farmers Emerge
In China, being a farmer exists more as a status than as a profession. Agriculture in Europe and America is led by a group of professional farmers armed with modern scientific and technical expertise, while Chinese agriculture relies more on the traditional experience of depending on the weather.
A close reading of the 2015 government work report reveals that the phrase “cultivating professional farmers” is quite interesting. In the traditional view, “farmer” is more of a status than a profession. Since it is a profession, then who can be a farmer is an unavoidable topic, because not everyone born a farmer is suited to being a farmer.
The level of professionalization among Chinese agricultural workers is not high
Who will be the farmers? This question seems rather absurd; in the conventional view, farmers are of course farmers, except in specific eras when the population flowed from cities to rural areas——that is, from urban resident to farmer, but for the vast majority of the time population flow has been from rural areas to cities. The past 30-plus years of rapid economic growth have been accompanied by a large-scale transfer of agricultural labor. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that the proportion of agricultural workers in the total number of employed persons fell from 70% in 1978 to 59% in 1990, and then to 31.4% in 2013.
So many farmers leaving the countryside for the cities not only improved their own circumstances but also supplemented the urban labor shortages that emerged after reform and opening up.
More and more farmers leaving the countryside has in fact not led to a shrinkage of agricultural production; on the contrary, total grain output has hit new highs year after year. For comparison, China's total grain output in 1978 was 30476.50 million tons, while by the end of 2013 it reached 60193.84 million tons. But although agricultural output has hit new highs year after year, the volume and value of imported agricultural products have kept increasing. Since China joined the World Trade Organization, the scale of the grain trade has been expanding continuously, and overall it has been dominated by imports. In 2002, China's grain imports were 14.17 million tons, rising to 77.96 million tons in 2013.
Why does China still import on a large scale after a bumper harvest? There are several explanations for this. First is the cost advantage. China's imported grain mainly comes from developed countries such as those in Europe and America, where grain production is large in scale and unit costs are low, making prices cheap. Second is the demand for diverse tastes. Although many imported agricultural products win out on price, people also flock to expensive imported agricultural products. In this regard, the diversification of consumption brought about by rising urban incomes is one factor.
⟦NL> Why can domestic agricultural production not lower the prices of agricultural products, and why can domestic agricultural products not satisfy consumers' diversified needs? Of course, agricultural products are closely tied to a region's natural endowments; we cannot expect to grow lychees and Chinese bayberries in northern China, but for many agricultural products, besides natural endowments, the skills of the workers may also have a great deal to do with it.
The emergence of professional farmers requires reform of the agricultural land system
Compared with the large-scale production operations of agriculture in Europe and America, the biggest problem with Chinese agriculture may be insufficient scale and a low level of professionalization among workers. In China, being a farmer exists more as a status than as a profession. Agriculture in Europe and America is led by a group of professional farmers armed with modern scientific and technical expertise, while Chinese agriculture relies more on the traditional experience of depending on the weather. It is precisely for this reason that Premier Li Keqiang proposed in the government work report to “cultivate professional farmers.”
How are professional farmers to be cultivated? Many people think of it as being like practicing lawyers and professional accountants, through “training in professional skills and professional ethics, obtaining qualifications to hold the post, and raising average incomes.” But is this idea really feasible? I doubt it. One very important point is that once agricultural production is scaled up, a professional farmer is more like an entrepreneur, needing to collect and judge all kinds of market information. If an entrepreneur's ability cannot be judged by a practicing certificate, then the same is true of professional farmers.
In my view, the most important thing for professional farmers is nothing other than lowering the entry threshold for farmers. Within the existing institutional framework, being a farmer exists as a status, which means many urban residents cannot go to the countryside to be professional farmers. Because of the restrictions of the agricultural land system, they cannot engage in agricultural production; or if they do engage in agricultural production, various factors prevent them from expanding their scale. This is somewhat similar to the government's restrictions in the early 1980s on farmers going to the cities to work. On December 30, 1981, the State Council issued the Notice on Strictly Controlling Rural Laborers Going to the Cities to Work and the Conversion of Agricultural Population to Non-Agricultural Population, requiring urban units to strictly control recruitment from rural areas, conscientiously clean up the rural labor force used by enterprises and institutions, and strengthen measures such as household registration and grain management.
But later facts proved that the trend of farmers moving to the cities could not be controlled. Since farmers can go to the cities to work as laborers, why can't urban residents go to the countryside to farm? This may be a phenomenon that must inevitably be faced in the future process of urbanization. Of course, this requires reforming the agricultural land system; only in this way is it possible for professional farmers to emerge in China.