Who will farm the land, and how? Scholars raise the question

The continuous flow of cheap rural labor into cities is a real manifestation of the improvement in China's resource allocation efficiency. China's rapid economic growth has benefited from urbanization. As urbanization continues to deepen, the modern agricultural industry chain keeps improving, and agricultural science and technology keep advancing, the contribution of technology and capital to agricultural output in the modern agricultural economy will far exceed the contribution of land and labor. The fact that China's grain output has grown for more than ten consecutive years also shows this: the number of people farming the land is decreasing, but thanks to technology and capital, the land managed by a single laborer has increased substantially, labor productivity has kept rising, and the question of who will farm the land will be resolved accordingly.

Recently I read the paper "Research on the Aging of the Rural Labor Force in Beijing" by Zhang Yinghong and Liu Nina, researchers at the Beijing Rural Economy Research Center. Through data analysis of the agricultural labor force human resources in Beijing, they once again raised the worry of "who will farm the land, and how."

The data listed by Zhang Yinghong and Liu Nina show that the growing aging of Beijing's agricultural labor force is not optimistic: the number of young laborers under 45 has dropped sharply, and older laborers aged 45-60 have become the main force in Beijing's agricultural production; from 2000 to 2010, Beijing's agricultural labor force under 45 decreased by more than 50%, while the proportion represented by young people under 25, the group newly entering the agricultural industry labor force, also fell from 8.6% in 2000 to 4.3% in 2010; as of 2010, the proportion of older agricultural laborers aged 45 and above in Beijing reached 60.1%, an increase of 13.5 percentage points over 2000. Zhang Yinghong and Liu Nina believe that at this rate, the aging of Beijing's agricultural labor force will deepen further, and possibly faster.

In fact, this is not only the case in Beijing. The accelerating aging of the agricultural labor force in other regions across the country is equally severe. By 2010, the proportion of older agricultural laborers aged 45 and above was 71.8% in Zhejiang, 69.5% in Jiangsu, 65.2% in Shanghai, 60.9% in Chongqing, 53.5% in Hubei, and 51.4% in Fujian.

Huang Jikun, a researcher at the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also pointed out in a 2015 paper that at present, the intergenerational difference in employment choices between two generations of farm household labor is extremely significant. For example, the proportions of parents engaged in farming and in part-time work were 69.8% and 21.4% respectively, while the proportions of their children engaged in farming and in part-time work were 5.1% and 6.2% respectively. In the next 5 years, the proportion of the population engaged in farming will continue to decline. At the same time as the future proportion of farm household labor engaged in farming declines, the average age of the agricultural labor force will rise by more than 1.1 years annually, showing a trend of aging.

William Petty, the founder of British classical political economy, once said: "Labor is the father of wealth, and land is the mother of wealth." If agriculture is stable, the world is secure. However, along with the advancement of China's industrialization, urbanization, and urban-rural integration, a large number of surplus young and middle-aged rural laborers keep moving to cities and towns, and problems such as hollow villages, idle or abandoned land, and the "elderly, young, and women" being the permanent rural residents are becoming increasingly severe. "Who will farm the land" has always been a concern of agricultural economics researchers.

The main reason for the aging of the rural labor force is the rapid development of urbanization. Due to the needs of urban development and the two-way mechanism of choice among young and middle-aged laborers, more and more young and middle-aged laborers enter cities and towns to work or receive education. Therefore, in the process of industrialization, rural migrants are mainly young and middle-aged laborers, while those who remain in rural areas are mostly older people.

As young laborers become fewer and fewer, the worry of "who will farm the land" becomes heavier and heavier. However, judging from scholars' research, the academic community still has great disagreement on the impact of rural labor transfer on agriculture. Scholars such as Li and Xu Na believe that the loss of agricultural labor and the aging and feminization of the agricultural labor force will make agricultural production and agricultural modernization face challenges. The massive loss of agricultural labor leads to a shortage of agricultural labor and a decline in overall quality, which is not conducive to the adoption of advanced production technologies and to production and operation. Wang Yuemei, Li Lan, and others believe that the outflow of rural labor may also change farm households' intensive farming practices and production decision-making behavior, resulting in extensive management or even abandonment of land. But there are also different views holding that the outflow of rural labor increases household income, promotes productive investment, and at the same time effectively alleviates the contradiction between people and land, improves the allocation efficiency of production resources, and provides favorable conditions for large-scale and industrialized agricultural production and operation. They believe that labor transfer has not had a significant impact on agricultural production, and there is no need to worry too much about an agricultural crisis arising from it.

From a global perspective, a decline in the proportion of agricultural labor is an inevitable trend, and aging is a worldwide problem. The average age of the agricultural labor force in the United States is 58, and in Japan it is as high as 67, while in Europe one third of farmers are also over 65, and the proportion of young and middle-aged agricultural laborers under 35 is less than 5%. Some research data show that the average proportion of global agricultural employment in 2010-2012 was 30.5%, down 7.4% from the previous 10 years. For China, according to the United Nations "World Population Prospects 2012," if calculated by medium fertility, China's working-age population (16-60) by 2020 will be about 1.6% lower than in 2011, and agricultural employment will account for about 24% of the country's total employed population, nearly 200 million agricultural laborers. In the future, as professional farmers continue to develop, there should be no need to worry about having such a number of farmer laborers.

The continuous flow of cheap rural labor into cities is a real manifestation of the improvement in China's resource allocation efficiency. China's rapid economic growth has benefited from urbanization. As urbanization continues to deepen, the modern agricultural industry chain keeps improving, and agricultural science and technology keep advancing, the contribution of technology and capital to agricultural output in the modern agricultural economy will far exceed the contribution of land and labor. After World War II, land basically did not increase, and the agricultural labor force fell sharply, yet the fact that total world agricultural output grew several times over shows that the main contributing factors promoting the growth of the modern agricultural economy have shifted to technology and capital. The fact that China's grain output has grown for more than ten consecutive years also illustrates this issue: the number of people farming the land is decreasing, but thanks to technology and capital, the land managed by a single laborer has increased substantially, productivity has kept rising, and the question of who will farm the land will be resolved accordingly.