What are the main problems currently facing agricultural development?
First, agricultural costs are rising ever higher, and the security crisis over grain and other major agricultural products is becoming increasingly evident.
Both the national agricultural department and the statistical department say: China's grain and other major agricultural products have achieved "ten consecutive increases," with total output exceeding 120 billion jin. Per capita availability of staple grains has reached 900 jin, setting a record high. Yet at the same time, net imports of grain and related products have been growing at double-digit rates, reaching 14 billion jin in 2013, also a record high. The self-sufficiency rate for major agricultural products set by the state is 95%, but the actual self-sufficiency rate has already fallen below 90%.
Has China's grain output really achieved "ten consecutive increases"? If it really were "ten consecutive increases," how could such contradictory phenomena arise? Could the truth be exactly the opposite, that China's output of grain and other major agricultural products is actually in a relatively low trough?
It is now "elderly agriculture" that is producing grain, and this is an indisputable fact. Since 1990, China's grain purchase and storage prices have risen only 6-fold, while the prices of other goods have risen by N times 6-fold. Under such circumstances, of course only the left-behind elderly, who have labor power but no market price, are engaged in grain production. The question of who will farm the land (grain) in the future has even the central leadership deeply worried.
Because of the worry that no one will engage in grain production, the government promotes land transfer, using fiscal funds to subsidize so-called agricultural leading enterprises or large-scale operators, who transfer land from farmers at high prices to carry out "intensive" operations. The land transfer price has now reached an average of 800 yuan per mu per year; converted to RMB, Russia's is only 2 yuan per mu per year, the United States is below 100 yuan per mu per year, and Japan is only between 100-150 yuan per mu per year. After China's agricultural leading enterprises or large-scale operators lease old farmers' land at high prices, will they produce grain?
The author has traveled throughout the country and inspected countless production bases of agricultural leading enterprises. Scenes of hundreds or thousands of mu of land, or dozens or hundreds of contiguous greenhouses, growing only grass and no crops, can be found everywhere. In the dozens or hundreds of villages the author visits each year, grain output declines year after year, yet what is reported is always year-after-year increases.
I do not understand: no one believes that agricultural leading enterprises or large-scale operators, after obtaining land, would rather let it lie fallow than produce grain, so why do governments at all levels, on the grounds of food security, promote the concentration of farmland at high prices into the hands of agricultural leading enterprises and large-scale operators? When policy is divorced from reality, the more the central government subsidizes and invests in agriculture, the more energetically local governments carry out such unreasonable things. Under such an incentive mechanism, can consecutive grain output increases be credible?
Second, reform policies such as the land system have gone astray; grassroots organizations and governments are becoming increasingly disorganized, and rural governance is becoming increasingly ineffective;
As unfair and unreasonable policies, such as farmers occupying land without paying rent ("if you don't occupy it, you gain nothing") and "the more you occupy, the more subsidy you get" (agricultural subsidies are verified according to the area occupied, so those who occupy land but do not grow grain also enjoy subsidies for grain seeds and the like), gradually move toward "unchanged for the long term" and legalization, the uneven and unfair distribution of occupied land within villages becomes legalized and permanent. This leads to an ever-increasing phenomenon of violent land occupation and induces uncontrolled expansion of homestead land and private plots, to the point of inducing some people to attack the legitimacy of the Communist revolution, and some even produce land deeds from 65 years ago to demand the return of "ancestral property." The land system is not only the root of agriculture, but also the root of the rural economy, rural society, and rural politics, and even the root of rural ecology and rural culture. Fairness -- equal land rights and public capture of appreciation -- is the most fundamental principle for building and improving the rural land system, but this principle no longer exists under the distorted discourse of "reform." This is the source of the proliferation of rural chaos.
For a fairly long period, land reform, agricultural industry policy, and adjustments to rural economic policy, among others, have not evolved in the direction of consolidating farmers' village community and its autonomy, but in the completely opposite direction. In particular, while abolishing the agricultural tax, the right of the village collective (community) to collect land contracting fees by virtue of land ownership was also abolished. As a result, the democratic self-governance system of the village community under the leadership of the Party branch has increasingly existed in name only due to the loss of property rights institutions and economic foundation. Party leadership in rural areas has increasingly weakened, and the trend toward mafia-like rural society has become increasingly obvious, and this trend continues.
Since the reform, the authority of township governments has been continuously weakened, and they basically have no command authority over the various functional departments under their jurisdiction. Coupled with the gradual disintegration of farmers' village communities, township Party committees and governments can hardly legally or normally and effectively exercise governing power. The work of township governments is generally reduced to the "four big items": compiling data, preventing and blocking farmers' petitions, dealing with family planning inspections, and chasing projects. Moreover, the vast majority of township Party committees and governments share one common feature in completing these "four big items," namely "fakeness." It is now extremely rare for township economic data, family planning data, fiscal revenue and expenditure data, and data on the use of project funds from central transfer payments not to be falsified.
Third, the opening up of the agricultural industry to the outside world is out of control, endangering national security.
Against the backdrop of globalization, the United States and other countries, relying on their agricultural technological advantages and capital strength and using free trade as a weapon, strive to seize other countries' market shares in agricultural products and contest pricing power -- pursuing stable market share returns and pricing power returns, that is, implementing a strategy of "weaponizing" agricultural products to exercise "control" over other countries' economic, political, and social security. A country with a large population like China must ensure the autonomy of its own agricultural industry in order to safeguard its own security.
After China's accession to the WTO, it opened up agriculture without precautions. Whether in technology or seeds, its autonomy has increasingly weakened; whether in the overseas market share and pricing power of labor-intensive agricultural products, or the domestic market share and pricing power of land-intensive agricultural products, its autonomy has increasingly weakened; whether in the production, purchase and storage, and processing of agricultural products and related products, or in logistics and retail commerce, foreign capital enters unimpeded, and quite a few local governments have even handed over the grain purchase and sales system to foreign capital. If such a trend continues, it will inevitably endanger national security.
Fourth, agricultural modernization deviates from farmers' urbanization, causing the social risk of the modernization transition to grow ever higher.
In the early period of reform, China's rural registered population was more than 700 million. After more than 30 years of high-speed development through reform and opening up, China's rural registered population increased to more than 900 million. In all the earlier developing countries and regions before Asia's "Four Little Dragons," under the modernization background of implementing industrialization and urbanization strategies, when per capita GDP reached 4,500 US dollars, the rural population had basically already been urbanized -- leaving less than 15% agricultural and rural population. China's industrialization is nearing its end, and per capita GDP has already exceeded 7,000 US dollars, yet the rural farmer registered population has not fallen but risen, which has no precedent in the modernization process of all earlier developing countries (regions). The author's explanation for this phenomenon is: after the gradient transfer of general manufacturing worldwide to China, a "China inflection point" appeared -- reversing from "a minority manufacturing for the majority" to "the majority manufacturing for the minority" -- manufacturing became excessive, and the low wages of Chinese migrant workers cannot support the high cost of their urbanization. China's export-oriented industrialization -- developing general manufacturing -- merely created 200-300 million urban floating people, but failed to create 200-300 million urban citizens and families.