How do farmers participate in the market? Scattered farmers need to join forces for development
“Last year I went to the countryside to investigate. By the Dawen River, I saw a woman pulling a plow in front while a man held it from behind. We have already entered the 21st century, yet our production methods from more than 2,000 years ago are still continuing.” Recently, at a seminar on “land share cooperation and effective forms of realizing the collective economy,” Xu Yong, dean of the China Rural Research Institute at Central China Normal University, gave a deep sigh.
He said, farmers have no money, the village lacks money. Where has the money gone? The money is in the market. Farmers need to participate in the market, not be swallowed by it.
How do farmers participate in the market? Through what methods can the collective develop? Over so many years of reform and opening up, we have been searching for answers. Of course, there is more than one way out. In the view of the experts attending the seminar, the land share cooperatives now rising widely across the rural landscape may be one of the effective forms.
Scattered farmers have the need to join forces for development
Before 2011, Ancun village in Pengji Subdistrict, Dongping County, Shandong Province, was still an “empty shell.” The village committee had only 2 tables and 3 chairs, and what remained was 240,000 yuan in debt. Because of poverty, the village had no village director for 9 years. Most young people had left the village, and those who stayed at home relying on those few mu of land were also not doing well economically.
But now, walking into Ancun, with just a little inquiry at a farming household, one discovers that this place is already in a different state. In 2013, the Andawang Land Share Cooperative was established. By introducing a company to build a Chinese medicinal herb planting base alone, the collective earned more than 300,000 yuan, and farmers could still get a guaranteed rent of 1,000 yuan per mu per year. In just over a year, various types of land share cooperatives across Dongping County grew to 51.
“The rapid development of land share cooperation now is by no means accidental.” said Huang Zuhui, dean of the China Academy for Rural Development at Zhejiang University. “Share cooperation is a system unique to agriculture. Why should agriculture adopt cooperatives? Mainly because agriculture is household-based operation, and the limitations of household operation must be overcome. But the cooperative system itself also has certain limitations, especially as it extends vertically and extends downstream. Downstream is industrial processing, which is suited to the modern enterprise system.”
Ancun originally had a tradition of sheet jelly processing. For many years, the one-household-at-a-time working method could never escape the dilemma of small scale, difficult drying, low output, and little profit. With the development of the market economy, scattered farmers increasingly have the need to join forces for development. After the land share cooperative was established, a sheet jelly processing zone was built with investment on the village's wasteland, with unified ingredient mixing, management, and packaging. It also registered the “Anda” trademark, with unified purchasing and sales by the cooperative. The cooperative can achieve annual income of more than 2 million yuan, and processing households can also reach an average annual income of more than 100,000 yuan.
The benefits are obviously considerable. But some experts also suggested that in advancing the share cooperative system in agriculture, including land share cooperation, the relationship between the shareholding system and the cooperative system must be handled well.
“One is the relationship between the two in benefit distribution. Another is that from the perspective of the vertical integration of the entire agricultural industrial organization, upstream, that is, the primary industry of planting and breeding, should as much as possible be based mainly on cooperation. Downstream industrialization, realized through setting up processing plants and so on, and activities related to industry can be based mainly on shares.” Huang Zuhui said that although Dongping is all land share cooperation, there are still differences. Each village's situation is different. Starting from the actual industry and the local factor allocation, each should adopt the model that suits it best, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. This point is very important.
Clear property rights and industrial support are both indispensable
While interviewing in Dongping, the reporter heard this jingle: “Toil and sweat for a whole year, calculate how much the cost is. Fertilizer and diesel are not cheap either. If the land is not transferred, it is not worthwhile.” It can be seen that land transfer has taken root in people's hearts. But farmers also know, “whether this land is transferred or not, how it is transferred, and whether to join the cooperative, you have to be the one to decide.”
Generally speaking, the clearer the property rights and the stricter the protection, the more vitality the economy has. An important precondition for land share cooperation is clear property rights. In concrete operation, this means the confirmation, registration, and certification of land contractual management rights.
Deng Dacai, executive dean of the China Rural Research Institute at Central China Normal University, told reporters that in the process of developing land share cooperatives, Dongping County combined land rights confirmation with cooperative land management, turned farmers' land into shares, and guided farmers to contribute their land contractual management rights as shares, making land an asset that can obtain returns from cooperative operations.
“There are two very important concepts here. One is the empowerment of property rights, and the second is the implementation of property rights, or the exercise of property rights.” Luo Biliang, dean of the College of Economics and Management at South China Agricultural University, emphasized that with regard to farmers' management rights, because they are single households, farmers' capacity for action in the market context is very limited, so farmers' management rights must be revitalized. The subdivision of property rights, the transaction of property rights, and the allocation of property rights have become the basic threads for advancing practical innovation.
Regarding clarifying rural property rights, the experts believe that many places across the country, including Dongping, have already made very good explorations. But in the specific operational process, whether what is being confirmed is contracted land or what ordinary people call “ration land,” and under the condition that the second round of contracting has a clear time limit, how the term of rights confirmation is determined, and so on, still need to be clarified.
In addition, whether land share cooperatives can develop also depends on one precondition, namely that cooperation can increase returns compared with non-cooperation. “If this assumption does not exist, then the cooperative would not exist either.” said Chen Shengwei, vice dean of the College of Economics and Management at Shandong Agricultural University.