An Analysis of the Three-Entity Agricultural Model: Farming Households, Farmers' Associations, and Village Communities
Introduction: A Sketch of the Production and Life of a Typical Chinese Farmer
Zhang Zhongnong is a farmer in his thirties in northern China who farms full-time. The people farming in his village span the old, middle-aged and young, and farming income is basically about the same as what you would earn working in the city.
Zhang Zhongnong has contracted thirty mu of land in the village, and the fields he farms form a single complete plot. The village consolidated the land of the whole village, adjusting the original small plots into 600 square fields, which increased the total area of land by quite a bit. At the villagers' meeting, the contract fees were decided according to the size, fertility and distance of each plot. Contracting households must pay their contract fees to the village, and after deducting some necessary public expenses, the money is distributed again according to the number of people in each household. The village also organized the repair of irrigation facilities that had been out of repair for many years.
Zhang Zhongnong joined the ecological circular agriculture project run by the farmers' cooperative association. Now, apart from chemical fertilizer, pesticides, agricultural film, herbicides and additives can no longer be used. The amount of chemical fertilizer used is only about one third of what was used before to plant the same area of land. Zhang Zhongnong not only has to grow one crop of wheat and corn, he also raises 10 head of cattle. The main feed for the cattle is silaged straw. Cattle manure is used to produce biogas, and the biogas slurry serves as a "pesticide" to control aphids and red spiders, and also acts as a foliar fertilizer, while the biogas residue is a very good organic fertilizer. Zhang Zhongnong also raises some chickens and geese, because pest control in the fields uses physical methods, with insect-attracting lamps and sticky insect boards, and the insects feed the chickens. Cattle manure also raises earthworms, and the earthworms also feed the chickens, and the cattle manure after the earthworms have been raised in it is an even better fertilizer. One function of raising geese is to weed the fields. Soybeans are intercropped in the fields to fix nitrogen. Zhang Zhongnong himself also has to weed the fields by hand, which is the most tiring and time-consuming work of all.
The farmers' association is not the same thing as a specialized farmers' cooperative. There must be one farmers' association in every township or every two townships, and only one, and farmers' associations have been established in counties, provinces and all the way up to the central level.
The grain, beef cattle, chickens, geese, chicken eggs, goose eggs and so on that Zhang Zhongnong produces are all sold to the farmers' association. The county farmers' association runs beef cattle and free-range chicken processing plants, and the county farmers' association has opened agricultural product supermarkets in several cities. The farmers' association has technical advisers, who often come to the village, and when problems arise in the course of planting and breeding, he can go to them for advice. Now Zhang Zhongnong only uses the chemical fertilizer provided by the farmers' association, which is cheap and works well. When Zhang Zhongnong bought calves and built a straw silage pit, he took out a loan from the finance department of the township farmers' association. The loan procedures were very simple, and the interest was low. In addition, the farmers' association has an agricultural supplies store in every township, and the stores also sell some daily necessities, so the situation of fake and shoddy daily consumer goods running rampant in the village has been much reduced. Most of the profits the farmers' association earns from supply and marketing, processing and finance must be returned to the farming households, calculated according to each household's transaction volume, and this accounts for about forty percent of Zhang Zhongnong's income.
Zhang Zhongnong has two children. The older child attends junior high school in the township and can still help with some farm work after school. The younger child is at the village kindergarten. The kindergarten used the village collective's land and buildings, and the farmers' association also subsidized it with a sum of money. The kindergarten has two teachers, both girls from the village who studied early childhood education. Zhang Zhongnong is a filial son, and making it easier to care for his parents was one of the reasons he firmly returned to the village. The elderly people Zhang Zhongnong has to look after are not just his parents, but also his uncle and aunt and others, whose children are all very far away.
In the evening, Zhang Zhongnong sometimes also plays basketball on the village basketball court. The village basketball court is outdoors, and the farmers' association paid to build it. When winter comes, the township farmers' association organizes dragon and lion dance performances, something that had not happened for many years.
Zhang Zhongnong's village is a fully functioning, livable community with economic vitality and complete public services and cultural life. In China's vast countryside, there are thousands upon thousands of Li Zhongnongs and Wang Zhongnongs, whose production and lives are largely similar to Zhang Zhongnong's.
The passage above, by describing the production and way of life of a typical Chinese farmer, directly expresses a reasonable development model for Chinese agriculture, rural areas and farmers, with four key words: farming households, farmers' associations, village communities, and villages. The above is of course not reality, but an ideal model with real-world possibilities.
The narrative above touches on several important questions, including: Why should agriculture be based mainly on family operation? Why should China persist in small-scale farming households with diversified operation? What is the real predicament faced by China's small-peasant economy in tradition and in reality? Why must China persist in the village-community land system? Why should comprehensive farmers' associations be built? Why do cooperatives under the existing specialized cooperative law framework not solve the problem? Are Chinese farmers pure farmers? What are the characteristics, prospects and significance of the existence of Chinese villages?
I. The Advantages of China's Small-Peasant Economy and the Wrong Path of Transformation
China's traditional small-peasant economy is characterized by small-scale land diversified operation with the family as the unit. "Backward" and "without prospects" have always been the mainstream consensus, hence the need to "transform" or "eliminate" it. These views influenced a series of policies after the founding of the People's Republic of China. The direction of this series of policies was often the opposite of the characteristics of China's traditional small-peasant economy, such as pursuing collective agricultural production rather than family operation, whether in collective farms or agricultural companies; such as encouraging the expansion of the scale of operation per unit of land rather than small-scale intensive cultivation; such as emphasizing the path of specialized production rather than diversified operation.
(1) Why Agricultural Production Is Suited to Family Operation
The agricultural collectivization movement in China in the 1950s actually did three things: collective production; the establishment of collective land ownership, or the village-community land system; and the establishment of the commune as the vehicle for the agricultural socialized service system and the rural public service system. However, for the believers in and practitioners of the theory of agricultural collectivization, the reason for agricultural collectivization was mainly the first thing. They believed that developing large-scale agriculture with organized operation should be more conducive to agricultural development than the traditional small-peasant economy, increasing agricultural output, and more conducive to providing funds for industrialization. This understanding was, it must be said, a historical regret.
With regard to agricultural production, one cannot ignore the different laws governing the primary industry as opposed to the secondary and tertiary industries, and romantically and inappropriately apply laws that hold only in the secondary and tertiary industries to agriculture. This is the imagination of so-called scale operation and specialized division of labor in agriculture. Going from handicraft workshops to industrial production lines mass-producing homogeneous products means that the same product may now require only a few tenths or hundredths of the labor and time it once did. But in the process of agricultural production, the benefits of division of labor and cooperation are very weak. Agricultural products are not manufactured, but plants and animals that grow naturally, and scale operation in agriculture cannot change this basic fact. Even if the growth cycles of plants and animals can be artificially shortened, this is extremely limited. Agricultural production is an activity carried out over vast expanses of land and lasting at least several months; it is the continuous work of spring sowing, summer planting, autumn harvesting and winter storing. The seasons give rise to different kinds of labor, but different kinds of agricultural labor can be completed by the same person in different time periods. And in the same time period, completely the same work is done on all the land. Basically, the need for specialized division of labor and labor cooperation in agriculture is not great. At the same time, because agricultural labor involves raising living things over long periods, it is deeply affected by climate and other unexpected factors, and measuring labor performance and supervising it in the intervening period is very difficult.