Agriculture is aging rapidly - who will feed us in the future?
Not long ago, at the Southern Seed Industry Exchange Conference, the participants were basically agricultural people over fifty years old. In front of the booth of the China Seed Industry Online Exchange Exhibition, many agricultural people did not know how to scan the WeChat QR code. Nowadays, in an era of increasingly developed technology, the impact of agricultural aging is growing. Against the background of increasingly prominent contradictions in agricultural aging, “who will farm the land, and how to farm it” is becoming a common dilemma faced everywhere.
On the one hand, because the severely aging farmer population can only support a self-sufficient smallholder model, this inevitably leads to increasingly serious extensive management and even abandonment of cultivated land in many areas, which has already become an important factor affecting the security of agricultural product and grain supply.
On the other hand, when urban industrial and commercial capital enters rural areas, the process of large-scale land transfer is often accompanied by trends of “de-agriculturalization” and “de-grainization.” The larger the scale of land transfer, the faster “de-agriculturalization” and “de-grainization” develop. “De-agriculturalization” will, to a certain extent, endanger the security of our country's agricultural product supply, while “de-grainization” will inevitably intensify the pressure on food security. Under our country's actual national conditions, promoting land transfer must not only significantly raise the level of scale management, but also must achieve the basic goal of safeguarding the security of agricultural product and grain supply.
What is serious is that agricultural aging hinders the application of new agricultural technologies. In many rural areas, traditional farming models are still used. Now, online transactions are the trend of future development, but many agricultural people do not understand them and do not believe in them. The combination of traditional marketing models and e-commerce marketing models will certainly inject new vitality into agriculture. However, because of agricultural aging, it will hinder the path of rural e-commerce development.
Therefore, the trend of land transfer bringing about agricultural decline and intensifying the contradiction in food security must never be allowed to continue developing. Enough attention must be paid to the problems of “de-agriculturalization” and “de-grainization” in the process of land transfer and moderate-scale management, and attention must also be paid to the application of new agricultural technologies.