Urban agriculture development focuses on developing ten major functions

To develop urban agriculture, efforts should focus on developing the ten major functions of agriculture. First, the food security function; second, the employment and income increase function; third, the ecological conservation function; fourth, the tourism and leisure function; fifth, the experiential participation function; sixth, the environmental beautification function; seventh, the distribution service function; eighth, the science popularization and education function; ninth, the cultural inheritance function; tenth, the dignity rebuilding function.

Urban agriculture includes both urban district agriculture and suburban agriculture. Urban agriculture differs from suburban agriculture. Although both are agriculture that relies on the city, serves the city, adapts to urban development, and is incorporated into urban construction and development plans, suburban agriculture mainly provides agricultural and sideline products to the city and primarily satisfies the city's material needs, with a relatively low level of development, and is located in the areas surrounding the city. Urban agriculture, however, takes satisfying the city's diverse needs as its service purpose, is multifunctional agriculture, has a relatively high level of development, and its location includes the city center and surrounding areas. Urban agriculture encompasses suburban agriculture.

According to current empirical analysis, when per capita GDP reaches around 2000-3000 US dollars, a region can enter the stage of urban agriculture. According to this standard, among the more than 660 cities and more than 2000 county towns nationwide, most have reached the stage of developing urban agriculture.

Where does the driving force for urban agriculture come from? The city is the son of the countryside; the countryside and agriculture nurtured the city, but after the city separated from the countryside and agriculture, it embarked on a form of binary opposition. The desertification of the city makes urban residents miss the green fields of agriculture and the harmony of biodiversity. This pursuit of quality of life is a demand for a return to the relationship between humans and nature, an essential sublimation of the views on survival, life, and development, and the source of momentum for the development of urban agriculture. The deteriorating environment, foul air, pervasive noise, and congested roads further prompt people to turn their gaze toward agriculture and toward the countryside with its beautiful environment.

Unlike traditional agriculture, urban agriculture is a high-level, high-tech, high-quality green industry; it is an ecosystem completely reliant on the city's socioeconomic and structural functions; it is a modern agricultural system that is constructed and cultivated according to the city residents' diverse needs, integrating production, life, ecology, science, education, and culture; it is an engineering system integrating planting and breeding with processing, agriculture with industry and trade, and production with research and education; and it is an important component of the city's complex and enormous ecosystem.

The development orientation of urban agriculture is determined by the city's needs, reflecting both the metropolis's dependence on agriculture and the interdependent, mutually complementary, and mutually promoting integrated relationship between the city and agriculture.

In 1998, China's first Urban Agriculture Symposium was held in Beijing, and cities in the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, and Bohai Rim region began to broadly emphasize the development of urban agriculture. Beijing proposed to seize the high ground and make agriculture in the Beijing suburbs a leading force in China's agricultural modernization.

To develop urban agriculture, the main task is to comprehensively develop the multiple functions of agriculture. Drawing on the experience of urban agriculture worldwide and combining it with China's actual conditions, I personally believe that efforts should focus on developing ten major functions. First, the food security function; second, the employment and income increase function; third, the ecological conservation function; fourth, the tourism and leisure function; fifth, the experiential participation function; sixth, the environmental beautification function; seventh, the distribution service function; eighth, the science popularization and education function; ninth, the cultural inheritance function; tenth, the dignity rebuilding function.

First, the food security function. Today's food security situation is more severe than ever. Quantitative security is basically not a concern, but qualitative security is increasingly difficult, and food safety issues have become a serious social phobia. From the perspective of the domestic agricultural situation, with social development, China's per capita consumption of meat, eggs, and milk has grown rapidly, and per capita output of melons, fruits, and vegetables exceeds the world average, but demand is still climbing substantially, and the food security issue faces a severe test. We have spent enormous resources on the "South-to-North Water Diversion," yet the water-scarce north grows grain and ships it south, which is a disguised "North-to-South Water Diversion," an absurd and awkward paradox. From the perspective of the world agricultural situation, Kissinger once predicted: whoever controls food controls everyone on Earth. The United States began researching genetically modified organisms in the early 1960s, and by 2001, more than 130 agricultural products had been developed into GM varieties; today there would be even more. Their pursuit of genetic modification is not merely to increase yields, but more importantly to control other countries' agricultural product seeds at the source. Controlling seeds means, to a large extent, controlling the quantity and quality of agricultural products. Most of China's imported soybeans are genetically modified, and more than 90% of the vegetable seeds in Shouguang, Shandong, are controlled by multinational corporations; there is no choice but to buy them. Today, food safety must be controlled at the source. In developing the food security function, urban agriculture should excel in two areas: first, establishing organic agricultural product bases; second, avoiding genetically modified agricultural product seeds as much as possible.

Second, the employment and income increase function. The development of human agriculture can be divided into three stages: primitive agriculture, traditional agriculture, and modern agriculture. I personally divide modern agriculture into two stages: pre-modern and post-modern. Pre-modern means agriculture breaks its internally closed self-circulation and injects external forces, namely the use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and machinery. Post-modern agriculture, while developing the primary industry, introduces elements of the secondary and tertiary industries; it is a complete industrial system with linkage among the primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, integration of upstream, midstream, and downstream, and mutual promotion of production, supply, marketing, and processing. Its employment capacity naturally increases greatly. American farmers account for about 2% of the total population, while the number of people employed in service industries serving agriculture accounts for 17%-20% of the total population. Behind one farmer are 7 or 8 people serving him. China's agricultural employment capacity is far from being developed. For decades, we have followed a policy line of extracting agricultural surplus to serve urban and industrial development. The passive situation of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers has led society to associate anything related to agriculture with poverty, backwardness, and ignorance, giving agriculture a shabby and disgraced image. In developed countries, workers are the poorest, while farming is a profession that some people aspire to, and serving agriculture is as favored by society as urban service industries. Our agriculture has enormous potential in this regard to be tapped.

Third, the ecological conservation function. The secondary and tertiary industries both destroy the ecological environment; only the primary industry can restore and conserve ecology. Planting flowers and trees in cities all falls within the scope of broad agriculture; only agriculture has this function, because agriculture and nature have an innate harmonious relationship. Agriculture is a process of both economic reproduction and natural reproduction, and the objects of agricultural production are all living life forms. Unlike industrial products, which can be churned out quickly with overtime work, agriculture must follow natural laws. When grain is planted and when it is harvested, when animals conceive and when they give birth, must follow a life cycle and cannot be defied. Experts have calculated that a large tree 50 years old has an ecological value of about 200,000 US dollars in terms of absorbing toxic gases and producing oxygen, conserving water sources, increasing soil fertility, and providing habitats and breeding grounds for birds. This does not even count the value of the timber, flowers, and fruit themselves. Farmland has a strong ability to purify water. Each hectare of paddy field can purify 7500-12,000 cubic meters of sewage per day. When sewage is discharged into paddy fields, more than 90% can be purified in about a week, and the oxygen produced is even more considerable. Someone calculated for Beijing that the ecological service value of agriculture, forestry, and water has reached more than one trillion yuan, comparable to Beijing's total GDP. Now environmental problems are extremely serious: "smog feeds the people smog to serve," and concrete forests have replaced ecological forests.

Fourth, the tourism and leisure function. Agricultural tourism and leisure originated more than a hundred years ago in countries such as Italy and France. In the 1960s and 1970s, it spread to Japan, South Korea, and the Taiwan region. For the past decade or so, it has been very popular in mainland China. From a global perspective, the tourism, leisure, and sightseeing function of agriculture has strong development momentum and enormous development prospects. Especially as people's consumption levels continuously rise, incomes continuously increase, lifestyles change, and leisure time increases, tourism, leisure, and sightseeing have increasingly become an important part of people's lives, and agriculture has very broad development prospects in this regard. Agriculture has extended its roots from people's stomachs all the way to people's minds, sublimating from the material to the spiritual. The larger the city, the greater the interest of urban residents in yearning for the "flavor of the countryside."

Fifth, the experiential participation function. Establishing activity parks in the city center and surrounding areas that integrate experiential participation and picking is very meaningful. Displaying the cultivation of crops lets urban residents, especially children, know how crops such as wheat, rice, melons, fruits, and vegetables grow, so that they better understand and respect the process of life and love nature more. In Tokyo, Japan, several hundred "citizen farms" and "urban countryside schools" have already been built within the city. Today in developed countries, residential land with a vegetable garden is more luxurious than a private residence with a swimming pool, because with food safety issues becoming prominent, whether one eats what one has grown and raised oneself or what one buys from the market has become a basic measure by which the upper class and the wealthy gauge their standard of living.

Sixth, the environmental beautification function. Being suitable for business and livable is the basic function of a city, and the primary condition for livability is a beautiful environment, which is an important embodiment of a city's taste, style, and characteristics. The flowers, grass, and trees of a city all have an environmental beautification function. Some cities in Europe stipulate that flowers must be planted on windowsills. In recent years, Western countries have also generally seen the rise of the "suburbanization" phenomenon, with many people moving from city centers to rural suburbs. Germany's rural resident population has reached more than 40%, and the UK has reached nearly 30%. This return flow has mainly occurred in the past decade or so, and the momentum is growing stronger. UK surveys show that the returning population is between 25-40 years old, with a very obvious trend toward younger ages. The occurrence of the "counter-urbanization" phenomenon poses new topics for urban construction. In urban construction, how to make agriculture an organic component of the urban ecology and effectively enhance the quality of the urban ecological environment should be an important part. The city of Paris has proposed that through the alternating and overlapping appearance of urban civilization and agricultural civilization, the increasingly strong pastoral interest of residents should be satisfied, by means of interspersing "moderate above-ground building clusters" and "moderate pastoral clusters." London's urban farms and community orchards are spread throughout schools and parks, and crops are even planted in residents' courtyards and on balconies. Farms have even been established in the sky (on rooftops) and underground (in abandoned basements). New York has a shortage of land, so abandoned sports venues and public waste land have all been developed for growing crops. In the 1970s, France saw the rise of activities in which urban residents built "second homes" and opened artificial vegetable gardens. Singapore has retained half of its area as agricultural land in its urban development. These agricultural lands and the green spaces of urban built-up areas interpenetrate each other, forming a distinctive and beautiful urban landscape.

Seventh, the distribution service function. In today's increasingly refined social division of labor, a portion of the urban population needs reliable home delivery services, and urban agriculture is the most suitable force to meet this demand. For example, regularly delivering meat, eggs, milk, melons, fruits, and vegetables, including fresh flowers, to households in need. This is an industry with broad prospects that urgently needs development. Cities should appropriately retain and develop some of the most convenient buying and selling stalls, so that the survival of the lower classes has something to rely on. Many cities in the United States open "farmers markets" at fixed locations and fixed times. In the groves and grassy areas in front of the Los Angeles City Hall, a "farmers market" selling vegetables, flowers, and snacks opens at fixed times. Urban street vendors are not targets to be cracked down on for disrupting social order, but an indispensable urban function.

Eighth, the science popularization and education function. The greatest change brought by reform and opening up is the change in the relationships between people, between people and things, and between people and nature. From criticizing people on sight to putting people first, from taking pride in poverty to taking pride in wealth, from man can conquer nature to harmony between man and nature, people have finally come to know that natural laws must be followed. The famous French scientist Fabre has a well-known saying: "History praises the battlefields that lead people to death, yet disdains to tell of the wheat fields on which people depend for survival. History clearly knows the names of the emperor's illegitimate children, yet is unwilling to tell people where wheat comes from. This is precisely the folly of mankind." Urban agriculture must never let this folly continue, and should voluntarily take on this historical mission. The science popularization and education function should enter schools and classrooms, enter communities and families, and use modern network technology and online video to let children and urban residents know the growth processes of animals and plants and understand that natural laws cannot be violated.

Ninth, the cultural inheritance function. The key to the inheritance of the Chinese nation's 5000-year civilization lies in the cultural inheritance of agriculture. Agriculture has ten major cultural inheritance functions, including the inheritance of crop culture, the inheritance of agricultural technology, the inheritance of economic models, the inheritance of agricultural philosophy, the inheritance of agricultural institutions, the inheritance of the emphasis on agriculture, the inheritance of village clan culture, the inheritance of folk culture, the inheritance of pastoral literature, and the inheritance of traditional Chinese medicine culture. Traditional rural culture played a very important role in China's rural social management. Modern agriculture should have a stronger cultural inheritance function than traditional agriculture, with greater carrying capacity and load-bearing capacity, such as the application of modern high technology and modern information technology, which should be vigorously developed. The whole society should understand that without the inheritance of agricultural civilization, all human civilization is meaningless, and the mistaken notion that the farther from agriculture one is, the closer to modernization one is, must be overcome. Some experts predict that in the next decade, the agricultural field will become the final arena of competition between China and the United States. This shows that human competition starts from agriculture and ultimately returns to agriculture, the origin on which survival depends.

Tenth, the dignity rebuilding function. Looking across history, agricultural civilization, industrial civilization, and urban civilization are the three basic carriers of human civilization. Other civilizations are all attached to these three carriers, and each later civilization develops on the foundation of the previous one. Agricultural civilization is the mother civilization. Against the backdrop of rapid industrialization and urbanization, agriculture is already "passing through the busy market with a worn hat covering its face," and agricultural civilization lacks even the most basic dignity. Against such a backdrop, we must rebuild the modern dignity of agricultural civilization; otherwise, the synchronized advancement of the four modernizations is destined to become an empty phrase.

Urban agriculture has a relatively superior geographical location and uniquely favorable conditions for gathering resources. It faces the group with the most say and is situated in the vortex where strong public opinion is most easily formed. Rebuilding the modern dignity of agricultural civilization can only be the task of urban agriculture!

In building modern agriculture and realizing agricultural modernization, urban agriculture is the vanguard and the new elite. In the call for "coexistence of city and nature," "return of green industry to the city," and "integration of city and countryside," urban agriculture will become a leading force in agricultural modernization. Starting from urban agriculture is the preferred path for our country to build modern agriculture and realize agricultural modernization.