What are the ways for rural cooperatives to participate in land transfer?
Developing the real economy in rural areas is inseparable from land. Right now land is scattered among smallholder farmers. How do you concentrate it for large-scale operation? If you run a production and operation project without scale, achieving good returns is also difficult. If you want scale, you have to concentrate the land from the farmers' hands. Our current system has run into a problem: if you want to rent land, what we now call land transfer, land transfer is in fact renting land, you have to pay land rent.
On this issue, my view is as follows: developing the real economy and producing goods is necessary. But I do not quite agree with using the form of land renting to carry out large-scale operation. Why? With the land-renting approach, in places like Henan, Hebei, Shandong and Shaanxi, the usual land rent is 800 to 1000 jin of wheat. These places generally have two seasons a year, and the two seasons' output in an ordinary year is about 1500 jin; reaching 2000 jin requires favorable weather. With this 1500 jin output, 1000 jin or 800 jin of wheat goes to pay the land rent. This land rent is even higher than when the Kuomintang led land reform, when they stipulated that land rent could not exceed 37.5% of the farmers' output. If today's land rent exceeds 50% of the grain output, it is about the same as before Chiang Kai-shek led land reform, too high. Our farmers' cooperatives are meant to lead farmers to increase income and become prosperous, yet they end up paying land rent to the farmers who rent out the land; the farmers become landlords and the cooperative becomes the exploited party, so this kind of production relation will not work.
Now some cooperatives, in order to deal with this problem, have started to find another way. For example, one cooperative adopted a biogas-rice-loach model. An ecological three-dimensional agricultural cycle model is of course very good, and if you do it well there is of course no problem. But where the cooperative is located I saw that it is not only you raising loaches; a company there also has more than 1000 mu of land and raises loaches too. If too many loaches are raised, sales are limited and the price will come down. At that point, how can you generate returns to pay land rent, pay wages and so on? For the operator this is a very big problem. Doing grain alone definitely will not work, but if you do not do grain and take up other business projects, once you make money the farmers will all follow suit, and after they follow, output increases and the price will fall. At that time the land rent certainly will not change, so the operating risk becomes great. Therefore, in my view, we must be very cautious on this issue.
Another cooperative built greenhouses and then leased them back to farmers, so that you do not have to pay wage costs. I have visited some enterprises doing agricultural production and operation projects that hire farmers and pay wages; basically they all fail, and the possibility of not failing is too small. This cooperative solved this problem and does not need to pay wages. I believe that on the land issue, entrusted operation should be adopted: smallholder farmers lack operating capacity, so they can entrust their land to the cooperative to operate. That is, some farmers have no labor power, or even if they have labor power they are unwilling to endure that hardship and would rather work outside; they can entrust their land to the cooperative, and at autumn harvest you supervise the output, and then we divide the proceeds. For example, originally one mu of land operated by a farmer yielded 600 jin of wheat, and the cooperative raises it to 1000 jin, not only guaranteeing the farmer's 600 jin return but giving an extra 200 jin. In this way, the farmer gets 200 jin more and the cooperative also gets 200 jin more, so returns are generated. Therefore, in land operation we should use the organizational framework of the collective economy left over from our past people's communes to carry out land transfer. The villagers' group or production team concentrates the land and transfers it to me. If there are a few troublemaking farmers who do not want to transfer, then, as this cooperative did, with the support of the local Party committee and government, carry out land consolidation and build the land into farmland that guarantees harvests despite drought or flood. If a few farmers are unwilling to join me, leave them aside; the land quality is not bad either, and those willing to join can put their land in, and those who see others doing well can join later.
Therefore, in my view, we must be cautious about the land-renting issue. Right now all over the country land confirmation of rights is being carried out and operation scale is being expanded. In my view, this is a policy that turns farmers into small landlords and revives landlords institutionally, which is not conducive to the development of modern agriculture. So I believe that this kind of land confirmation of rights and carrying out land transfer by paying land rent is a directional error. Even when Japan carried out land reform back then, it negated landlords, and this decision, through several decades of practice, has been confirmed by facts to be correct. In my view, when cooperatives carry out production and operation projects other than cooperative credit, the basic economic principle of opposing landlord exploitation should still be upheld.