Four Issues to Watch in Advancing Land Transfer and Scale Operation

At present, China's agriculture is at a critical stage of accelerated transformation, and whether traditional agriculture can smoothly achieve the historic leap to modern agriculture fundamentally depends on whether the process of land transfer and appropriate scale operation can be advanced steadily and in an orderly manner. Under the central government's macro-policy goals of further clarifying the deepening of rural reform and accelerating land transfer, and with the vigorous promotion by local governments and relevant departments, it can be expected that rural land transfer and appropriate scale operation will usher in a new period of comprehensively accelerated development, accompanied by a process in which the efficiency of agricultural land use and the level of modern agriculture will be significantly raised on the existing basis. However, due to the existence of a series of complex constraining factors, four important issues in this process require close attention.

I. Pay close attention to protecting farmers' interests

The land issue involves the vital interests of hundreds of millions of farmers. Land contractual management rights belong to farming households, and whether land is transferred, how prices are determined, and what forms are chosen should be decided independently by the contracting farming households, and the returns from transfer should belong to the contracting farming households. Therefore, on the one hand, simplified administrative intervention must not be used to advance land transfer and appropriate scale operation. Fundamentally, land transfer is a path rather than an end, and one must not transfer for the sake of transfer. Great attention must be paid to the problem of advancing land transfer through administrative methods such as majority rule, assigning tasks, issuing quotas, or incorporating transfer area and transfer ratio into performance assessments. The process of advancing land transfer and appropriate scale operation must not evolve into a process in which other interest subjects deprive farmers of their land rights and interests, and even less into a process of passively squeezing out farmers and creating a landless farmer group on a large scale. On the other hand, advancing land transfer and appropriate scale operation must not simply adopt a “fixation at a low level” model. A large number of surveys show that although the forms of land transfer are diverse, “long-term lease, fixed rent, paid annually” remains the dominant model of land transfer at present. Although the method adopted by most, calculating rent according to the current-year price of goods in kind, basically ensures the security of land transfer returns, farmers still find it difficult to fully participate in the process of agricultural scale operation and share in the value-added returns of the industry. Therefore, more attention should be paid to protecting farmers' principal position, and more attention and support should be given to new explorations that transfer land and develop appropriate scale operation through methods such as guaranteed minimum dividends, so as to safeguard farmers' rights to land returns in a more stable and lasting way.

⟦NL> II. Pay close attention to cultivating new types of operating entities with strong driving capacity

At present, the unsuitability of smallholder farming is becoming increasingly exposed, and the need to change the mode of agricultural operation has further strengthened. At the same time, driven by interests, urban industrial and commercial capital has entered agriculture on a large scale, and the corporate agriculture model thus formed is expanding at a faster pace. However, international experience proves that for any country or region, it is difficult and unreliable for the stable development of agriculture to rely on corporate agriculture as its support. The stable development of agriculture must be built on the foundation of a farmer group that takes agriculture as a lifelong occupation and rural social networks as the basic space for survival. The future development of China's modern agriculture should neither take the decline or even disappearance of farmers as its cost, nor can it simply exclude the entry of agricultural enterprises. It is bound to be a development trend of mixed operation, and farmer operations and agricultural enterprises should not be in a simple competitive and opposing relationship.

In advancing land transfer and appropriate scale operation, on the one hand, it is necessary to give play to the comparative advantages of agricultural enterprises in resource integration, technology absorption, market expansion, and quality control, and support the appropriate development of agricultural enterprises in fields suited to them. In this process, attention should be paid to studying and determining the appropriate standards for land scale operation in the region based on factors such as the natural and economic conditions of different regions, the situation of rural labor transfer, and the level of agricultural mechanization, so as to prevent the unreasonable development of a single scale preference led by agricultural enterprises that seeks largeness and quantity. On the other hand, even more attention should be paid to increasing the coverage of land transfer and appropriate scale operation in a broader rural area. Under the realistic conditions that the areas entered by agricultural enterprises are limited and their driving capacity is insufficient, although the scale of land transferred by specialized large households, family farms, and farmer cooperatives is relatively small, their comparative advantage of a more stable and close interest relationship with farmers is very obvious. At present, in particular, more direct policy support should be given to land transfer through specialized large households, family farms, and farmer cooperatives, mainly relying on the accelerated development of such new types of operating entities with obvious local characteristics and stronger actual driving capacity, to raise the level of agricultural scale operation in a broader rural area.

III. Pay close attention to adaptive adjustment of support policies

Land transfer and appropriate scale operation are not merely a simple process of optimizing the allocation of the land factor, but will inevitably bring about an expansion of demand for factors such as agricultural technology, agricultural machinery, finance, insurance, and service systems, and changes in the mode of supply, thereby fundamentally changing the mode of agricultural operation, the mode of development, and the mode of service. Therefore, the original policy support methods that still maintain or are seriously biased toward agricultural enterprises, or that are inefficiently inclusive of small farmers, have shown increasing unsuitability, and the need for policy adjustment brought about by accelerated land transfer has become very urgent. At present, the most critical thing is to accelerate the construction and improvement of a policy support system for new types of operating entities. Focus should be placed on giving more targeted policy support to specialized large households, family farms, farmer cooperatives, and others with greater scale rationality and actual driving capacity, from three important aspects: improving productive infrastructure conditions, improving the mortgage financing function of land management rights, and strengthening the ability to resist risks. It must also be recognized that appropriate scale land operation will inevitably lead to a rapid expansion of demand for socialized services, but relative to the production link, policy support in this area is particularly weak, and the contradiction of unsuitability is more prominent. Therefore, advancing land transfer and appropriate scale operation absolutely requires not only the support of institutional breakthroughs such as confirmation and certification of rights, but also the timely adjustment of a series of unsuitable related policies on the basis of property rights reform, so as to improve the policy system, calibrate policy goals, support the development of diversified socialized service organizations, and significantly improve the policy performance of advancing land transfer and scale operation.

IV. Pay close attention to the security of agricultural product and grain supply

Against the background of the increasingly serious contradiction of agricultural aging, “who will farm the land, and how will it be farmed” is becoming a common dilemma generally faced. On the one hand, because the severely aging farmer group can only support a self-sufficient smallholder model, this will inevitably lead to the growing phenomenon of 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, the process of urban industrial and commercial capital entering rural areas to transfer land on a large scale 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 China's agricultural product supply security, while “de-grainization” will inevitably intensify the pressure on grain security. Under China's actual national conditions, advancing land transfer must not only significantly raise the level of scale operation, but must also achieve the basic goal of safeguarding the security of agricultural product and grain supply. Therefore, the trend in which land transfer brings about agricultural decline and intensifies the contradiction of grain security must never be allowed to continue, and sufficient attention must be paid to the problems of “de-agriculturalization” and “de-grainization” in the process of land transfer and appropriate scale operation. The basic policy choices should include two aspects: first, strictly restrict changes in land use and protect the comprehensive agricultural production capacity in land transfer, effectively strengthening the constraint mechanism. Second, further increase policy bias toward agricultural and grain production scale operating entities in fiscal, financial, insurance, and other aspects, effectively strengthening the incentive mechanism.