Land transfer must be advanced in an orderly way according to local conditions
The Central Rural Work Conference held at the end of 2014 pointed out that in advancing agricultural modernization, it is necessary to persist in taking safeguarding national food security as the primary task and ensure that grain is basically self-sufficient and that staple food is absolutely safe. However, at present a large number of young and middle-aged laborers in China's rural areas have flowed out, and in many rural areas no one is willing to farm the land and no one knows how to farm it. The dilemma of rural "hollowing out" has become increasingly prominent, and food security has been affected.
Under such difficulties, land transfer has become a response adopted in many places. Judging from the practice in Shaxian, Fujian, there are many notable aspects. The first is fully respecting farming households: after various drawbacks appeared when farming households spontaneously carried out land transfer, the government then improved and promoted it on the premise of voluntariness. This kind of policy advancement with endogenous demand enabled the benefits of land scale to be realized quickly. The second is establishing and improving supporting safeguard mechanisms. This not only guaranteed farming households' basic transfer income, but also, through institutional innovation, enabled farming households to obtain secondary income, strongly promoting the improvement of local agricultural production conditions and the continuous optimization of the agricultural industrial structure, and achieving win-win outcomes for multiple parties.
According to statistics, as of the first half of 2014, China's land transfer area had reached 380 million mu, accounting for 28.8% of the total contracted cultivated land area, providing the premise for realizing the advantages of agricultural scale. However, problems such as administrative coercion in land transfer and difficulty in delivering farming households' income have also appeared one after another in some places. Shaxian's successful practices provide useful reference for other regions, and also remind us once again that the advancement of land transfer must be suited to local conditions. Only by advancing prudently and steadily can the expected goals be achieved.