Agricultural industrialization becomes a fast track for farmers to increase income locally
How can the millions of farming households be organized to carry out targeted assistance, so that the guiding role of fiscal poverty alleviation funds in “achieving maximum results with minimal input” can be fully brought into play, while also letting the market play a decisive role? The answer is becoming increasingly clear in Zhejiang: through the organization of the agricultural industry, leading enterprises and specialized cooperatives are guided and encouraged to establish agricultural product bases and develop agricultural product processing in key poverty alleviation villages, with low-income farming households either joining, taking shares, or finding employment. Today, these new types of agricultural operating entities with poverty alleviation functions have become an important force in Zhejiang's poverty alleviation efforts.
For many key poverty alleviation villages and low-income farming households, the key reason for long-term poverty is still the lack of information, capital, technology and other paths to escape poverty and achieve prosperity. Through agricultural industrialization, Zhejiang incorporates the production and operations of poor villages and poor households into the industrial chain, and the problem of finding paths to prosperity is readily solved. Today, models such as “government + company + farming households”, “company + base + farming households”, “company + farming households”, and “cooperative economic organization + company + farming households” are leading low-income farming households to rapidly achieve local income growth and poverty alleviation.
⟦NL> In these models, leading enterprises play a pivotal role. As intermediaries connecting farming households, bases and the market, they provide services such as technology, information and sales, while the farming households they reach only need to carry out standardized production according to orders. The two are bound into a community of shared interests with close interaction. Enterprises use the strength of dispersed farming households to form a relatively large scale in a short period of time and generate economies of scale; at the same time, farming households that originally fought alone can also avoid and reduce the risks brought by going into the market single-handedly.
Longquan, one of the less developed counties, has tasted the benefits of such exploration in recent years. At present, Longquan has 25 leading poverty alleviation enterprises and 208 poverty alleviation specialized cooperatives. Through industrialized development, among the city's key poverty alleviation villages there are already more than 240,000 mu of distinctive agricultural industry bases, and farmers have achieved local income growth. Last year, the city's per capita net income of farmers broke the 10,000 yuan mark for the first time, reaching 10,368 yuan, an increase of 19.7%.
On the road to poverty alleviation, many leading enterprises have made indispensable contributions. Taking Longquan's unique black fungus industry as an example, Tianhe Food Co., Ltd. alone, through the “company + specialized cooperative + base farming households” interest linkage mechanism, drives 500 farming households with a 1,600-mu standardized base, while order-based production on 3,200 mu can drive 15,000 farming households, truly a “hero” in helping farmers increase income. Relying on industrialized development, one third of the employment and income of farmers in the entire city of Longquan now comes from the black fungus industry.
Similar to Longquan, Xuenei Village in Sankui Town, Taishun County, has adopted “Wenzhou merchants leading, all residents taking shares, village-enterprise cooperation, and win-win development”. All villagers took shares with their land contractual management rights, and more than 220 farming households then became company shareholders in the form of specialized cooperatives or joint shareholding, establishing Wenzhou Ruixue Agricultural Development Co., Ltd. On the basis of adhering to the separation of village and enterprise, the company introduced a modern enterprise management system and carried out unified planning and management of the entire village's resource elements.
In just a few years, Ruixue developed into a comprehensive agricultural enterprise integrating planting and breeding, processing and sales, with products selling well on the market. By the end of last year, the share capital of Xuenei Village villagers who took shares with land had all been returned in the form of dividends, with dividend amounts reaching more than 1.6 million yuan. At present, more than 300 villagers are employed at the company, and the income model of “drawing a salary every month and receiving dividends at year-end” has truly fattened everyone's “wallets”.
Today, land in many key poverty alleviation villages in Zhejiang has been incorporated into the construction of agricultural industrialization bases, and each base is driven by a new type of operating entity. Base construction supports the development of the entity, and the development of the entity promotes industrial scale-up. Zhejiang's regional distinctive economy of “one village one product, one town one industry, one county one characteristic” is increasingly taking shape.
This approach in Zhejiang, using agricultural industrialization to drive poverty alleviation and development, allows originally dispersed factors to be concentrated and circulated, shifts the mode of production toward scale, shifts the mode of operation toward shareholding operation, and shifts poverty alleviation and development toward a “blood-generating” model, putting agricultural efficiency and farmers' income growth on a track of virtuous cycle.