How can the problem of cheap vegetables hurting farmers be solved? It cannot rely only on timely help

In some vegetable-producing areas of Jinzhong, Shanxi, large quantities of fennel cabbage are stuck unsold, with no one willing to buy even at 0.1 yuan per kilogram, and many vegetable farmers' hard work for a year has come to nothing. Reporters learned that growing one mu of fennel cabbage, including seeds, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, plastic film, irrigation and so on, costs about 700 yuan. The yield per mu is about 4,000 kilograms, and the purchase price is 0.08 yuan per kilogram. If all the vegetables are sold, the income per mu is only 320 yuan, which is not even enough to cover the labor costs of harvesting and selling the vegetables. Therefore, many vegetable farmers give up harvesting, and patches of fennel cabbage rot in the fields.

Industry insiders analyze that the main reason for the low price of fennel cabbage lies in the mismatch between vegetable farmers' production decisions and the market's “invisible hand”: at present, vegetable farmers basically produce and gauge the market as individual households, so their production scale is small, production costs are high, feedback of market information is weak, and their ability to respond to the market is poor. Due to a lack of judgment about market risks, vegetable farmers often decide the next year's planting scale based on the previous year's vegetable prices, which easily leads to crowding into the same crop and causes prices to soar and plunge.

In order to help vegetable farmers solve their urgent problem, many caring people in Taiyuan have called on ordinary citizens, major enterprises and schools through Weibo and WeChat to take the initiative to contact them to buy fennel cabbage, and government departments are also actively helping vegetable farmers find markets and sales channels. At present, with the joint efforts of the whole society, the unsold situation of fennel cabbage in the Jinzhong area has been alleviated to some extent, but because the harvest timing was missed, much of the fennel cabbage is no longer edible, and the vegetable farmers' losses are already certain.

The purchases by caring enterprises and citizens are undoubtedly timely help for vegetable farmers. But such measures can solve the vegetable farmers' immediate urgency, yet it is difficult to solve their long-term predicament, and cannot prevent the phenomenon of “cheap vegetables hurt farmers” from happening again. Industry insiders suggest that, in addition to providing protective policies, relevant departments should provide more guidance information, reduce the production uncertainty caused by information asymmetry, and issue early warnings to vegetable farmers when necessary to minimize losses. At the same time, it is necessary to upgrade the level of the vegetable industry, improve the linkage between production and sales, raise the level of value added through storage and processing, and enhance the ability of fennel cabbage cultivation and even the vegetable industry to withstand the dual risks of nature and the market.