Moderate-scale agricultural operations: allow exploration, exploration, and more exploration
In Wuxing Village, Baitou Town, Chongzhou City, Sichuan Province, no one in the family of 60-year-old Huang Xianliang still farms the land, but their fields are not idle. He joined a share cooperative with his land, and each year he not only receives a guaranteed 200 jin of rice, but in good harvest years he can also receive dividends; last year the dividend reached 367 yuan per mu.
Unlike the common “one-off deal” style of land transfer, Huang Xianliang chose the land shareholding approach, sharing both returns and risks with the entire cooperative.
Menu-style trusteeship, full-process trusteeship, land leasing, land shareholding…… As the pilot program for registering and certifying rural land contractual management rights advances steadily, new models of land transfer are constantly emerging across the country.
The Central Rural Work Conference held a few days ago proposed actively developing various forms of moderate-scale operations. This is the inevitable path of agricultural modernization and also the conscious choice of the farmers. To develop moderate-scale operations, there are many different methods; it is necessary to adapt to local conditions, fully give play to the pioneering spirit of the grassroots and the masses, and allow “exploration, exploration, and more exploration.”
The conference also stressed that “as long as it complies with national laws and policies, conforms to the direction of reform, and is welcomed by the farmers, no matter what form it takes, it must be encouraged and supported.” These statements fully reflect the central authorities' respect for and encouragement of the farmers' pioneering spirit.
The “small-peasant economy” was once a true portrayal of Chinese agriculture. Compared with developed countries, China's agricultural labor productivity and degree of mechanization are relatively low, and one reason is that land management is too fragmented. In recent years, China's land transfer has shown an “accelerating” trend. Data from the Ministry of Agriculture show that the proportion of transferred land in contracted land exceeded 20% in 2012, exceeded one quarter in 2013, and has now approached 30%. The small-peasant economy that has lasted for thousands of years is gradually advancing toward large-scale, modern agriculture.
“Moderate-scale land management is a natural process of the development of productive forces.” Han Jun, deputy director of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, believes that developing moderate-scale operations must fully take into account factors such as the natural and economic conditions of each place, the degree of rural labor transfer, and the level of agricultural mechanization and socialized services, and determine the standard for moderate-scale operations in each region according to local conditions. It is necessary both to actively encourage it and not to pull up seedlings to help them grow; it is necessary both to avoid abandoned land and excessively fragmented operating scale, and to prevent excessive concentration of land and artificially “building up big households.”
“The land issue involves the vital interests of hundreds of millions of farmers. Land contractual management rights belong to farmers' households. Whether land is transferred, how the price is determined, and how the form is chosen should be decided independently by the contracting farming households, and the transfer income should belong to the contracting farming households.” Guo Xiaoming, vice president of the Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences, believes that simplified administrative intervention methods cannot be used to promote land transfer and moderate-scale operations.
At the same time, some problems that have occurred in the process of land transfer have also attracted widespread attention. The conference stressed that it is necessary to guide and regulate the orderly transfer of land management rights, develop various new types of agricultural operating entities, adhere to giving priority to grain and agriculture, avoid “de-grainization,” and resolutely prohibit the “de-agriculturalization” of cultivated land.
Zhang Xiaoshan, a researcher at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that in response to the possible tendencies toward de-agriculturalization and de-grainization when industrial and commercial capital enters agriculture, a strict access system should be established, with a clear upper limit control on long-term, large-area leasing of farmers' contracted cultivated land, and a dynamic supervision system should be established to promptly investigate and correct illegal and irregular acts such as wasting agricultural land resources and changing the use of agricultural land.
“Developing modern agriculture cannot ignore the basic agricultural reality that ordinary farming households operating their own contracted cultivated land still make up the majority.” Zhang Xiaoshan said that industrial and commercial capital should drive farmers to develop modern agriculture, not replace farmers in developing modern agriculture; it should create a driving effect for farmers, not a crowding-out effect.