Farmland Transfer Requires Both Care and Patience
Once the autumn harvest is over, many farming households will be busy with a new round of land planning. For a growing number of farming households, such planning is no longer the familiar matter of thinking about what to plant and how much to plant in the fields next year, but rather whether to rent out their land, whether to rent a bit more land, or whether to take advantage of the winter to fix up a ditch or a road.
Such planning takes place in rural fields and in farming households, and it reflects a huge and profound change now unfolding in rural China. As the comprehensive deepening of rural reform advances further, the transfer of rural land contractual management rights has become a new issue that must be addressed, such as “who will farm the land” and “how to farm the land.” Thus we have seen that in recent years, especially over the past two years, the scale and pace of farmland transfer have clearly increased. According to surveys by relevant departments, in the first half of this year the scale of rural land transfer nationwide was already close to one-third of the total contracted land.
It is precisely against this backdrop that everyone, full of enthusiasm and excitement, is guiding, encouraging and promoting farmland transfer. In addition to stressing the principles of compliance with the law, voluntariness and compensation, we also need to highlight one topic: farmland transfer requires care and requires patience.
Why is care needed? This requirement is mainly directed at county and township government departments and village committee organizations. For large-scale land renters or agricultural enterprises, in reality they often do not need to deal directly with farming households when renting land; most of the time, village-level organizations or township and county-level departments step in to communicate with farming households, and in areas where land transfer trading platforms have been established, some land rentals are completed through the trading platforms. But no matter through whom, farmers must ultimately be involved. For village-level organizations and government departments, their role at this time is multiple: they represent the renters in negotiating with farming households, they represent farming households in negotiating with renters, and at the same time they bear responsibility for supervision and guidance. Therefore, without considerable care, it is very difficult to do this kind of land rental work well, with its divided plots and differing requirements.
As for the renters, on the one hand village-level organizations and township departments need to understand the other party's land rental requirements and meet those requirements as far as possible; on the other hand they also need to understand and even investigate the other party's true intentions and actual capacity. For example, some rent land but do not farm, nor do they keep the farmland in agricultural use; some do not have much financial strength and need to rely on loans secured by the land rental, and without loans they can neither pay the rent nor afford to buy seeds and fertilizer. In such cases, more and more detailed understanding is needed. One must not be so eager to attract renters that one ruins the farmland, misses the farming season, and hurts farming households as well.
As for farming households, land transfer is even more delicate work. Rural conditions vary greatly, and farming households differ from one another. Whether to rent out land and when to rent it out involves each person's own requirements and plans. Farming households willing to transfer land each have their own circumstances, and those unwilling to transfer land have even more varied reasons: some are older and can only farm at home; some need to farm to secure their food grain and daily necessities; some grow relatively profitable crops and earn a higher income; and some simply like to farm a bit, farming having become a habit and a way of life, and so on.
Faced with these circumstances, unless one works carefully and in a targeted way to find solutions, the chances of success are very small. In this regard, many places have mature practices, but there are also places that cannot do this delicate work. When most farming households in a village agree to transfer land and a minority do not, they adopt a one-size-fits-all approach and apply “the minority submits to the majority,” forcibly transferring land, and the result leaves behind lingering problems.
With care, patience is also needed. The requirement of patience, for village-level organizations and township departments, is sometimes an even greater test of people. Care is mainly a matter of working methods; as long as the work is done thoroughly, farming households in an acquaintance society are mostly willing to “follow the crowd” and give the “middleman” this face. Patience, however, is more a test of the starting point of the work of village-level organizations and township departments: is it to complete transfer tasks and rent out the land as quickly as possible, or to proceed from the actual conditions of the local countryside and solve both the problem of farmland being left uncultivated and the problem of large operators' profitability?
In reality, although few places explicitly assign land transfer tasks and transfer targets to townships and village groups, many places treat land transfer as a major task to be grasped, and some have even set corresponding target schedules, which inevitably gives rise to rushed and rash action or mutual comparison. In addition, some places offer work rewards for doing land transfer well, and some large transfer operators even receive rewards and subsidies for acting as intermediary coordinating organizations, which makes it even easier to create a problem of seeking quick success. Land transfer could originally have been done after farming households had thought it through and made up their minds, or more acceptable forms of scaled operation could have been explored, such as unified management methods like commissioned cultivation and commissioned management, or specialized cooperatives. But because of a lack of patience and an inability to wait, land transfer was simplified.
Therefore, care and patience in farmland transfer concern not only whether farmland transfer advances smoothly, but also the quality and efficiency of farmland transfer. At present, we need both to actively guide and encourage it, and to respect the law, respect objective patterns, and respect farmers.