If growing grain doesn't pay, how can the nation's rice bowl be held steady?

As a journalist covering agriculture, one of the perks is being able to escape the city's noise and often go out to the fields, to see the vast farmland, the livestock farms nestled among green mountains and clear waters, and the magnificent water conservancy projects. Over the past year or so, I have been to a new-type urbanization pilot county town, a land system reform pilot village, and all kinds of family farms, hill ponds and reservoirs, vegetable and fruit greenhouses, and pigsties and pig farms.

In the course of coming and going, the phenomenon I saw most often was this: farmers grub away year after year growing grain, then discover that after toiling for most of their lives to grow it, they still cannot feed themselves and their families, and have no money to send their children to school or their elders to see a doctor, so in desperation they abandon the land and run off to the city to work for wages. As a result, the fields become wasteland, and the elderly and children left at home become the left-behind population. Then, on some lonely night, a village cadre has a flash of inspiration and discovers a broad avenue that can lead the whole village's left-behind population to prosperity: say goodbye to rice and wheat and everything else, and from now on grow only cash crops, the more blueberries, strawberries and hawthorns the better, because these fetch a higher price than grain and city people love to eat them. After that, the whole village pushes through the new and renovates the old, transferring all the land and switching all of it over to these crops, so that besides making big money selling fruit, they can also run fruit picking and agritourism, killing several birds with one stone. Or else someone simply transfers all the land to a company, and they can do whatever they like with it, as long as they pay rent every year.

And so, in the many rural areas I passed through, I saw an enormous number of orchards, greenhouses, agritourism spots and agricultural resort scenic areas. Contiguous stretches of grain fields grew fewer and fewer, and the popularity of wheat, rice and soybeans went from bad to worse.

Land transfer is beyond doubt a good medicine for solving the current problems of agricultural development, because only by transferring land in contiguous blocks and ultimately forming a certain scale, and then letting a small number of people carry out unified operation and management of large areas of land, can the basic conditions for raising production efficiency exist. But I do not know why land transfer changes flavor as soon as it reaches the grassroots level: some grassroots cadres treat land transfer as a vanity project, setting targets and forcing farmers to transfer their land.

Last year the national per capita income of farmers approached 9000 yuan, yet the income truly coming from crop farming was less than 1/4 of that. A farmer once did the accounts for me: the profit from growing one mu of rice, no matter how you calculate it, is only a few dozen yuan, and that is in good weather; if there is any natural or man-made disaster, "you'll lose your shirt."

I once lived in Australia for several years, and the more places I traveled in China, the more I unconsciously compared farmers of the two countries in my mind, though of course the comparison is limited to what the eye can see. Australian farmers have considerable social status and live freely and independently; though they too labor in the fields, proud smiles can often be seen on their faces. By contrast, farmers in China are like a small boat drifting in the ocean, going with the current, appearing helpless and powerless. Under such a reality, how can the nation's people hold their own rice bowls steady?