How Is China's Agricultural Development Model Being Transformed? Resource-saving and Environment-friendly Development Is the Call of the Times

After more than 30 years of reform and opening up, China has entered the mid-stage of industrialization and a period of rapid urbanization, and agriculture is in the best period of development in its history. Since the implementation of the rural “household contract responsibility system”, the enormous vitality of agricultural development has been unleashed as never before, propelling China from an era of food shortages toward a new era in which the food and clothing problem of more than a billion people has been fundamentally solved and a moderately prosperous society in all respects is being built. From 2004 to 2006, all provinces across the country abolished the agricultural tax within two years, ending the “imperial grain tax” that had existed in China for more than two thousand years, thereby resolving the greatest three rural issues problem that China had been unable to solve over several thousand years of history——the issue of agricultural taxation, which became a great milestone in the history of China's agricultural development.

Since entering the new century, and especially after 2003, although agriculture has been affected by multiple factors such as increasingly tight resource and environmental constraints, a complex and volatile domestic and international economic situation, and frequent and recurring natural disasters, what is truly remarkable is that China achieved for the first time since the founding of the People's Republic a “eleven consecutive increases” in grain output, making this the fastest period of development in its history. Looking back at the history of world agricultural development, among the major agricultural countries, only the United States achieved “five consecutive increases” during 1975-1979 and India during 1966-1970. It can be said that, whether measured by historical standards or by contemporary world standards, China's agricultural development in recent decades has set up a “Chinese benchmark” for the world. These brilliant achievements in agricultural development have laid a solid foundation for the modern transformation of agriculture and have placed China's agricultural development at a new starting point.

But there is no denying that the excessive reliance of grain and agricultural output growth on resource and input factors has come at a huge environmental and ecological cost, and China's agricultural development is facing unprecedented challenges. First, as the population continues to grow, the existing agricultural development model faces the challenge of continuously expanding demand for agricultural products. Despite consecutive bumper harvests in agriculture, international imports have grown larger and larger. Relevant data show that in 2011 agricultural imports exceeded one tenth of China's total output, with soybean imports accounting for 57% of total global soybean exports. It is predicted that by 2050 the global population will grow to 9.3 billion, requiring an additional 680 million tons of cereals; China's population will grow to about 1.5 billion, exceeding the total population of the developed countries at that time, with demand for cereals of about 780 million tons and demand for meat of about 120 million tons. Second, as the quantity of cultivated land and water resources decreases and their quality declines, the existing agricultural development model faces the challenge of steadily strengthening resource and factor constraints. As an unchangeable national condition, China's per capita agricultural resources are far below the world average; its per capita forest area, per capita freshwater resources, per capita land area and per capita cultivated land area, four key agricultural resources, are only 26%, 33%, 36% and 40% of the world average respectively. And per capita agricultural resources are continuously decreasing. Third, as economic globalization and industrialization and urbanization continue to advance, the existing agricultural development model faces the challenge of rapidly intensifying competition for resource factors and domestic and international competitive pressure. On the one hand, as China's industrialization and urbanization accelerate, competition between rural and urban areas and between agriculture and industry for resources and factors such as cultivated land and water resources will become increasingly fierce. On the other hand, low labor productivity has seriously affected agriculture's competitiveness. China's yields per unit area for cereals, rice and wheat reached the level of developed countries in 2008, and maize yield also reached the level of moderately developed countries, but agricultural labor productivity was about 47% of the world average for the same period, about 2% of the average of developed countries, and only about 1% of that of the United States and Japan. At the same time, multinational corporations are increasingly strengthening their monopoly position over international agricultural product markets and resource allocation, making competition between Chinese agriculture and developed countries even more difficult. Fourth, agricultural development supported by the expansion of resource factors has triggered a series of problems such as resource destruction, environmental pollution, soil erosion and land desertification, and the existing agricultural development model faces the challenges of deteriorating rural ecological environments and the quality and safety of agricultural products. Relevant studies show that in recent years China's annual chemical fertilizer application has accounted for 30% of the world total, pesticide use per unit area is double that of developed countries, and about 500,000 tons of agricultural film remain in the soil each year, with the rural ecological environment deteriorating day by day.

Every era has its major issues, and solving them pushes human society one step forward. Global warming and energy depletion pose severe challenges to human survival and development, and building a “resource-saving and environment-friendly society” (hereinafter referred to as a “two-oriented society”) is the central issue of today's world economic and social development and a problem the international community seeks to solve; it represents the common ideal of all humanity and the direction of future social development, and is a common mission that no country can afford to ignore. The Fifth Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China explicitly proposed “building a resource-saving and environment-friendly society” and for the first time designated “building a resource-saving and environment-friendly society” as a strategic task in the medium- and long-term plan for national economic and social development. After the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the “Chang-Zhu-Tan urban agglomeration” and the “Wuhan urban circle” were designated as national comprehensive supporting reform pilot zones for building a “two-oriented society”, and the building of a “two-oriented society” entered the practical stage and was demonstrated and promoted nationwide. The 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China put forward the major strategic deployment of “transforming the economic development model”, clearly making the transformation of the agricultural development model a major task in transforming the economic development model and a key and difficult point in the transformation of the national economy. The Third Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China clearly stated, “accelerate the transformation of the agricultural development model” and “establish a resource-saving and environment-friendly agricultural production system, and basically form a resource-saving and environment-friendly agricultural production system by 2020”. The report of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China further proposed, “give prominence to ecological progress, incorporate it into all aspects and the whole process of economic, political, cultural and social progress, and strive to build a beautiful China and achieve the sustainable development of the Chinese nation”, thus for the first time giving prominence to ecological progress and clearly advancing the building of a “two-oriented society” and achieving green development, low-carbon development and circular development, with the ultimate goal of building a beautiful China. And the ecological function of agriculture is becoming ever more prominent, so accelerating the transformation of the agricultural development model and achieving sustainable agricultural development will inevitably become important content in ecological progress. The spirit of the central authorities and policy guidelines have defined the contemporary content of China's agricultural development in the new period and pointed out the strategic direction for transforming the agricultural development model toward “two-oriented” development.