Why farmers are no longer willing to make a living by farming
Yuan Longping, member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the father of hybrid rice in China, once did the math with a reporter: "According to a survey by the Hunan Provincial Price Bureau, in 2011 the net income for farmers growing one mu of rice was only 116.6 yuan, but that includes 109.1 yuan in direct state grain subsidies. In fact, without the subsidies, the net income for farmers was only 7.5 yuan."
This is not the first time Academician Yuan Longping has appealed on issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, such as grain prices and farmer subsidies. Why does Mr. Yuan Longping raise such suggestions again and again? Because he has always worked with the land and knows well the real situation of rural areas, farmers and agriculture. So when faced with the cold reality that "a farmer earns seven yuan and fifty cents from one mu of land," he is as anxious and worried as the farmers themselves. As a farmer, although I have been working away from home and no longer farm in recent years, my eldest brother farms, my father-in-law farms, many of my relatives and friends farm, and I also have land (which my eldest brother farms). So I am no stranger to the situation in rural areas, especially farmers' income from farming. When I went home this Spring Festival, I asked my eldest brother how the farming income was. He did the math for me. With his own land plus mine, he farmed a total of 15 mu. Because of drought, the wheat and rapeseed harvests fell sharply, and he could not even recover the costs. He had hoped the autumn rice would make up for the losses on wheat and rapeseed, but then came an insect disaster. Before harvest, the rice was devoured over a large area by brown planthoppers, and even 600 jin per mu was not harvested. After deducting the costs of fuel for plowing, chemical fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, film, combine harvesters and so on, after a whole year of hard work in 2011, my eldest brother ended up empty-handed! In fact, even with favorable weather and state grain subsidies, after deducting production expenses from farming 15 mu of land, the net income my eldest brother finally got was only just over 2,000 yuan. If the labor costs of my eldest brother and sister-in-law are included, then farming for a year is equivalent to a loss. This is the reality of my eldest brother's farming. Without understanding rural conditions, some city people may find it hard to believe that farmers can earn so little from growing grain. Although in recent years the state has increased support and subsidies for farmers growing grain, the prices of agricultural production materials such as pesticides, chemical fertilizers, seeds, film and fuel have risen year after year, largely offsetting farmers' grain-growing income. Many farmers, like my eldest brother, find it hard to get rich by farming. Therefore, my eldest brother and sister-in-law also need to take short-term jobs during the slack season to supplement the household income.
Merchants do business to make money, workers work for wages, and the purpose of both is to make life better and better. Of course the same is true for farmers growing grain. If a farmer works hard growing grain for a whole year and earns only one or two thousand yuan, or even finds it hard to maintain basic living, how can you expect him to love grain production? How can farmers feel at ease farming? You should know that this little money still has to pay for children's tuition and social obligations, and if someone gets sick, it is even more of a drop in the bucket. I am very glad to see a CPPCC member like Academician Yuan Longping speaking up again and again for farmers, rural areas and agriculture. Calculating this account of grain growing is not me, a farmer, crying poor, but a true portrayal of my eldest brother and many farmers. Why is it that farmers have long found it hard to get rich by growing grain? This is obviously not a question I, a farmer, can answer. In rural areas, especially in some villages mainly engaged in grain growing, large numbers of young and middle-aged laborers have gone to cities to work. In the course of deepening industrialization and urbanization, the elderly and women have become the main body of agricultural labor. At the same time, most of the new-generation migrant workers who have gone to cities to work are not interested in agriculture and are unwilling to return home to farm. So in the future, "who will farm the land" and "how will the land be farmed"? Delegates and CPPCC members each expressed their views.
Huang Hongxiang, member of the CPPCC and researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences: Nowadays rural areas mainly rely on the "3899 force" to farm. The Hubei Provincial Department of Agriculture carried out household-by-household surveys in Zhudun Village in Yingcheng City, Baozhuang Village in Zaoyang City, Wucheng Village in Chongyang County, Gonggang Village in Jianli County and other places. The surveys showed that some time ago, the local agricultural workforce as a whole was relatively old and poorly educated: those over 60 accounted for 25%, and those with only primary school education or illiterate accounted for 55%. This situation exists widely across the country. Nowadays rural areas mainly rely on the "3899 force" to farm, and this trend will be hard to change in the short term. If the problem that farming income is lower than working income is not solved, it will be hard to change this situation. In fact, in order to increase farmers' enthusiasm for growing grain, the state has in recent years introduced a series of policies supporting and benefiting agriculture, such as abolishing the agricultural tax, issuing direct grain subsidies, improved seed subsidies, comprehensive agricultural input subsidies and agricultural machinery purchase subsidies, and implementing the minimum grain purchase price policy. Farmers' incomes have continued to grow steadily, achieving "eight consecutive years of rapid growth." However, because the comparative returns from grain growing are low, large numbers of young and middle-aged rural laborers still choose to go to cities to work. Dong Changsheng, deputy to the National People's Congress and president of Shanxi Agricultural University: The reduction in the number of farmers comes from the urban-rural gap, with half the labor force going out to work. I once found during a survey in a mountainous rural area in Shanxi that half of the labor force remaining in the village were the elderly and children. Among them only one person had a high school education, and the rest mostly had less than primary school education. The base of farmers is shrinking. Some reasons are internal to agriculture, but quite a number are external to agriculture: inequality in educational resources, employment pay and development opportunities has reduced the number of farmers directly engaged in agriculture. China's population aging, declining birthrate and wave of urbanization all affect agricultural production and the agricultural labor force.
"As an intellectual of the older generation, I am very concerned about who will farm the land in the future, and who will safeguard our 'rice bag' and 'vegetable basket' and other such issues. If this problem is not solved promptly and properly, it will affect China's path of new-type industrialization and the harmonious situation of economic and social development," said an academician of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Such scenes are often seen in the fields: women and the elderly sweating as they work, and children playing nearby or helping out from time to time. The collective flight of young and middle-aged laborers sets off the reality of rural China. They have fled the countryside, rushed to factories in the cities, and live as migrant workers. In the fields, agricultural production has to be undertaken by a "mixed force" of women, children and the elderly. The new-generation farmers born in the 1980s and 1990s are increasingly far from the land and generally lack both the willingness and skills to engage in agricultural production. This phenomenon has attracted great attention from all sectors of society. Particularly noteworthy are the three suggestions on solving the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers jointly submitted to the central decision-making level by 15 academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, represented by Shi Changxu, chairman of the council of the fellowship of senior academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. These 15 academicians pointed out that if the problem of new-generation farmers abandoning farming is not studied and solved strategically, a major populous country will face a situation where no one is willing to farm. This was also the central topic of the National Symposium on the Strategy of Modern Professional Farmer Education recently held in Jiangsu.
No one farming the land is an unavoidable problem. As China's industrialization and urbanization proceed rapidly, large numbers of the rural labor force, especially young and middle-aged laborers, have shifted to non-agricultural industries. The phenomenon of new-generation farmers abandoning farming has become increasingly prominent, and the shortage of agricultural labor is growing more serious. The proportion of people employed in China's primary industry in total social employment has fallen to 38.1%. Statistics show that its proportion of rural employment has fallen to 63.4%. The number of agricultural workers is plummeting and the aging trend is serious, and the pattern of agriculture lacking successors is intensifying. In some rural areas of central and western China, 80% of farmers are elderly people aged 50 to 70. They neither understand modern agricultural technology nor have the strength to farm because of their advanced age, causing more land to be abandoned. Among the country's agricultural workers, the results of the Second National Agricultural Census show this problem even more clearly. As of the end of 2006, those under 20 accounted for 5.3%, those aged 21 to 30 accounted for 14.9%, and those over 50 accounted for 32.5%. In some areas that took the lead in industrialization and urbanization, the aging of agricultural workers is even more serious. Taking Zhejiang's population engaged in agricultural production as an example, those over 50 account for 53%, while those under 30 account for only 6%. Even among students from rural areas, the "post-90s" generation studying in school, the vast majority have never regarded farming as a future career choice. Most of the post-80s and post-90s who seek work or do business elsewhere are also unwilling to return to rural areas to farm. In dynamic terms, in the First Agricultural Census in 1996, the proportion of agricultural workers over 50 was only 18.1%, and in the Second Agricultural Census it rose to 32.5%, an increase of 14.4 percentage points in 10 years. At this rate, by the Third National Agricultural Census in 2016, the proportion of China's agricultural labor force over 50 will exceed 50%. According to standards set by relevant United Nations agencies, said academicians including Shu Huairui, Wang Maohua and Shen Yungang, an agricultural labor force aged 45 and above is regarded as elderly labor, and when this part of the labor force exceeds 15% of the agricultural labor force, it can be called an elderly-age structure of the labor force. By this standard, questions such as "who will farm the land" and "on whom will agricultural modernization rely" are truly worrying. As the world's most populous country, experts from the Ministry of Agriculture, China Agricultural University and Wuhan University believe that the lack of a stable successor labor force in agricultural production has become a serious hidden danger threatening national food security, and that in the next 10 to 20 years this problem will become even more prominent, and may even affect the world.
Training new-type professional farmers is a common practice in developed countries. The Party Central Committee has always attached great importance to the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers and to food security, said academicians including Shen Qihan, Chen Wenxin and Yu Chongwen. In particular, the government's increased investment in agriculture, rural areas and farmers in recent years is obvious to all, but practice has proved that these issues are very complex. In addition to guarantees in understanding and thinking, it is also necessary to establish a long-term mechanism of real effort and practical work, and to bring the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers onto a legal track. Farming for a year is not as good as working away from home for a month. Rural areas cannot retain the migrating footsteps of young and middle-aged laborers. Academicians including Zheng Zhemin, Yu Hongru, Guo Musun and Zhai Guangming believe that this has greatly dampened farmers' enthusiasm, especially that of the new-generation farmers born in the 1980s and 1990s, for engaging in agricultural production. The fundamental way to solve the problem is to learn from the successful experience of developed countries. Because of rapid industrial development, Western European countries saw the urban-rural gap widen rapidly for a time after World War II. But these countries successively made explicit legal provisions that agricultural operators must obtain economic income equal to that of workers in other occupations. Japan, drawing even more on the experience of Western European countries, promptly formulated the Basic Law on Agriculture in 1961, at the beginning of its industrial economic takeoff, with the goals of narrowing the differences between industry and agriculture and between urban and rural areas and achieving income balance between agricultural workers and workers in other industries, and vigorously developed rural industry and so on. As early as 1975, the average number of years of education of Japan's agricultural labor force was 11.7 years, roughly equivalent to high school graduation in China; most Dutch farmers are graduates of higher or secondary specialized agricultural schools, and about 20% of working farmers enter vocational schools each year for continuing education. According to statistics, among China's agricultural labor force, the proportion with junior high school education or below is as high as 95%, senior high school accounts for 4.1%, and college and above only 0.2%. The serious shortage of agricultural skilled talent will bring serious consequences for the building of a new countryside. Academicians including Liang Sili, Huang Zuqia, Tong Zhipeng and Dai Yuanben believe that while continuing to vigorously promote the transfer of rural labor, the state should pay close attention to the problem of agriculture lacking successors. It is necessary to vigorously develop vocational education oriented toward rural areas, establish a compensatory education mechanism for farmers; farmers have never been treated well as city people. Rural issues such as water conservancy, garbage, electricity, internet access and medical care are almost unmanaged. The state urgently needs to repay the historical debt to "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" in education and train professional farmers or specialized households in planting and breeding. First of all, it is necessary to vigorously develop vocational education oriented toward rural areas, the academicians of the two academies suggested, and train a group of excellent professional farmers.
Bring rural vocational skills education into the overall national education plan, improve the vocational education training network, and for rural junior and senior high school graduates who fail to enter a higher school, arrange special funds by the central and local governments to provide free vocational skills education including scientific farming, breeding and modern agriculture, and issue vocational skills appraisal certificates. Encourage a group of high-quality talents to return to the countryside to build a new countryside. This can be mainly funded by the central government and supplemented by local governments. Second, vigorously promote returning-home entrepreneurship. Establish a young farmer entrepreneurship fund, and for ordinary senior high school or vocational middle school graduates engaged in agricultural operations and reaching a certain scale, corresponding financial support can be given to professional farmers returning home to start businesses. In addition, it is necessary to formulate and improve measures for graduates of colleges and universities, especially agriculture-related colleges, to devote themselves to modern agriculture, explore and formulate preferential support policies to attract urban youth to engage in agriculture, and adopt treatment such as retaining urban household registration and providing social security to attract them to become an important part of modern professional farmers. Vigorously cultivate and develop large planting and breeding households. Third, accelerate land circulation and bring up a large number of professional farmers. Surveys from Jilin Province show that for large corn-growing households with a scale of 20 to 30 mu and 30 to 70 mu, the average net income per household was 12,000 yuan and 23,000 yuan respectively, basically equivalent to the income of migrant workers who go out to work or do business, and after these people become professional farmers they will not easily leave rural areas. Improve the quality of agricultural workers. For example, fourth, strengthen farmer vocational training. Strengthen the construction of infrastructure for farmer education and training, further increase the scale of subsidies for professional farmer scientific and technological training, expand policy coverage, and innovate training forms. For farmers who remain in rural areas engaged in agricultural production, provide free vocational skills training every year, and give subsidies to qualified professional farmers. The current direct subsidies for grain production and subsidies for the purchase of agricultural machinery and tools can be tilted toward professional farmers, enabling them to expand production scale and improve market competitiveness.
Wang Haibo, member of the CPPCC and vice president of the Hebei Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences: Low agricultural returns naturally mean no one wants to farm. In fact, it is a question of the returns from agricultural production. At present, the issue of "who will farm the land" appears on the surface to be a question of people. Most of farmers' income comes from non-agricultural industries, so naturally no one is willing to farm. In some places wells have already been drilled to 1,000 meters. Hebei's farmland is short of water on a large scale. Across the north, the water shortage in farmland is almost irreversible. Due to years of resource overdraft. Note: three years ago, I wrote this article out of unnecessary anxiety. Three years later, my worry has become reality. Everyone has already felt the sharp rise in grain and vegetable prices. When I wrote this article three years ago, I only analyzed the crisis of no one farming the land. If I were to write it again today, I would have to add an even more difficult crisis to solve: the water shortage in farmland. Beijing's groundwater has already been drilled to 2,000 meters, and Shanxi's groundwater as well. Not only will grain prices continue to rise, but the prices of coal, gas and water will also rise. And rises in the prices of these basic factors will certainly bring rises in the prices of other daily necessities. Ordinary Chinese people will soon have to tighten their belts to get by. During this summer vacation I took several students back to my hometown in Anhui for research. I heard from village officials that in rural areas now only the old, weak, sick and disabled are left to farm, and anyone with a little promise has gone out. They asked worriedly: "Ten years from now, who will farm the land?" I remember when I was in primary school, the teacher taught us to address "Uncle Worker," "Uncle PLA" and "Uncle Farmer."
From then on, farmers in my impression were kindly elders. But now "Uncle Farmer" no longer farms; those who farm are "Grandpa Farmer" and "Grandma Farmer." The village officials I met were also all at the "grandpa and grandma" level, mostly over fifty, and some already past sixty. They said the young people had all gone out, and those who had not gone out were unwilling to take the post of village official: "Only a little more than one thousand yuan a year, what's the point?" They also reported that rural schools were empty: "The good teachers have all left, and the students followed them." After returning, I checked the data and found that the serious aging of the farming population is a nationwide phenomenon. In the better-off places, the average age is in the forties; in the worse-off places, it is in the fifties, with only white-haired people left among the green mountains and clear waters. In the rural areas of the past, although poor, there were crowing chickens and barking dogs, people laughing and horses neighing; it could be called a "seething countryside." But now the feast is over and the grand scene is gone, and only around Spring Festival is there a bit of joy. In some villages one cannot even find a strong man to carry agricultural machinery. Someone sighed that in a few more years, perhaps even people to carry coffins will not be found... Nostalgia for the pastoral countryside is not important. What is important is that in another ten years, the average age of China's farming population will reach over fifty or even over sixty. As "Grandpa Farmer" and "Grandma Farmer" pass away, the farming population will shrink sharply. We cannot wishfully expect that ten years from now migrant workers who have entered the cities will return to the fields and relive a life of "facing the yellow earth with their backs to the sky." I am a farmer's child; will I go home to farm? Will you? The transfer of population from rural to urban areas is irreversible; this is common worldwide experience. The monotonous, lonely and arduous life experience of rural areas and farmers makes farmers entering the cities like the Yellow River entering the sea, never to return. Moreover, after leaving their hometown and land for many years, their physical strength has declined and they have aged, and even if they wanted to return to farming, they are no longer the heroes they once were. A farmer elder brother of mine who had recently entered the city once sighed while looking at farm work: "It's no good, I really can't do it anymore." In recent years the state has increased agricultural subsidies, easing the situation somewhat, but we must never expect that subsidies alone can "overcome" the era trend of farmer aging and rural hollowing-out.
China's land policies through the dynasties have left each household with extremely limited land, and farmland has been fragmented into tiles and patches, making it impossible to seek economies of scale. This kind of small-scale agriculture based on "one mu and three fen of land" can keep farmers fed and warm, but cannot make them rich; it can solve survival, but cannot solve development. Although there are a few exceptions, the overall judgment that "farming makes it hard to get rich" is difficult to change. In an era when everyone is striving to get rich, more farmers pin their dreams of prosperity on the cities. Because farmland is fragmented into tiles and patches, agricultural mechanization and modernization are difficult to carry out. I am not an expert on the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, but I have thought one thing through: the land always has to be farmed, either by people or by machinery. Now that farmers are unwilling to farm and machinery cannot be used to farm, sooner or later there will be a "grain shortage" and a "grain panic." This year, merely because meat prices rose, society and the government became highly nervous. If one day grain, oil and vegetable prices double, what will the situation be like? The aging of the agricultural population and rural hollowing-out are not problems unique to China; Japan and South Korea have both experienced the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers: farmer aging, agricultural hollowing-out and rural bankruptcy. According to 2006 statistics from South Korea's National Statistical Office, among South Korea's rural population, those over 65 accounted for 30%, more than three times the average aging level in South Korea. As of December 2005, South Korea's rural population as a share of the total population had fallen by more than half compared with 15 years earlier. The root cause of South Korea's agriculture, rural areas and farmers problems is low productivity, with average cultivated land per household of 1.36 hectares, an inability to raise the level of agricultural mechanization, and agricultural product prices on average 2.85 times higher than international agricultural product prices. The government's response is to encourage the concentration of farmland for scale operation, develop rural tourism and local industries, and raise farmers' non-agricultural income. The government plans to invest 119 billion US dollars in agricultural revitalization funds from 2004 to 2013, striving to bring agriculture back to life. Few young people in Japan devote themselves to agriculture.
In 1999 Japan had 3.24 million farming households, nearly half fewer than the 6 million in 1950. Among the agricultural employed population, about 50% are over 65, a serious aging situation. Compared with the 1950s, the crop planting area has decreased by about half, causing the food self-sufficiency rate to fall from 60% in the early 1970s to about 30% now, with heavy reliance on imports from China and the United States. For China, the uniqueness and importance of this problem lies in the fact that China currently has more than 1.3 billion people, expected to rise to 1.6 billion; without grain for a single day, there is instability for a single day. If Japan and South Korea lack grain, they can rely on imports from China. If China lacks grain, where can it import from? World grain prices will certainly soar. Most Chinese urban residents' lives depend on low-priced grain, oil and vegetables. Once the prices of grain, oil and vegetables double, urban residents' "happiness index" will plummet, and the entire price system will fluctuate sharply because of it, leading to political and economic crisis. Comparing the prices of grain, oil and vegetables in various countries, the rise in China's grain, oil and vegetable prices is proper and inevitable. I am now in South Korea and find that their vegetable prices, including the price of sweet potatoes, are about the same as meat prices! Farmer aging and agricultural hollowing-out are already rapidly approaching us, and the national decision-making level should be highly vigilant. Because from policy research and adjustment to legal formulation and implementation, not only financial and human resources are needed, but also time, especially for land policy. We must plan ahead. For example, should farmland transaction policy be relaxed to facilitate land circulation and consolidation, thereby promoting agricultural modernization and mechanization? After land consolidation, how should landless farmers be brought under state protection? Can a corporate structure be introduced into agricultural governance, allowing farmers to contribute land to form companies and achieve scale operation? How can social capital be attracted to take shares in agriculture? After villages become hollowed out, how should villages be merged and replanned? Land and agriculture have always been the foundation of the state, and one cannot but be cautious. But we cannot be timid merely because we fear possible risks. We must bravely answer: several years from now, who will farm the land? I am also a university teacher, and I am a farmer's daughter.
I speak according to my conscience, and every word is true. I am posting this in the hope of drawing more attention to the real conditions of farmers' survival. I cannot change the status quo, and can only use this method, hoping to do something for them. The examples encountered by my father and the villagers are only a microcosm of the living and survival conditions of 800 million farmers. I know that farming is very bitter for farmers, and the bitterness is in their hearts; in fact farmers are also happy, but this happiness comes from their living in a closed world, entertaining themselves... But how much do farmers really get? I went home during the "October 1st" holiday, and there were plenty of policies benefiting agriculture. I once again saw the difficulty of farmers' survival. Due to weak supervision by the town government, in June 2011 more than 20 shang of rice fields in Hapi Town, Changyi District, Jilin Province were flooded. The local television station once reported it and interviewed the person in charge of the town government. That person admitted on the spot that weak government supervision had caused the accumulated water to be unable to drain smoothly, thus flooding the good farmland. It was flooded for more than twenty days, right at the heading stage, and the farmers knew that these more than 20 shang of rice were finished. And that is exactly what happened. Afterwards, the farmers repeatedly sought the government to solve the problem, and the town head said: "At worst I won't be this town head anymore. What else can you do?" The simple farmers still thought: "Maybe we should just forget it. The land still has to be farmed year after year. Offending the town government would be terrible! What if they find a bunch of people and ruin our land?" Poor farmers. Is it kindness or ignorance? Or something else, I cannot say clearly. When I heard my father's words, my heart truly bled, and tears involuntarily ran down. On October 2, 2011, the farmers received a compensation form. I happened to be home for National Day and saw it. Only rice fields with total crop failure could receive subsidies, at 8 yuan per mu. And our family's 4 shang of total crop failure became 4 mu, with 32 yuan compensated.
Seeing this form and looking at the farmers' signatures, I was truly speechless. The cost of farming now is very high, and this measly 32 yuan truly chilled farmers to the bone. My father did not sign. He said he did not want the 32 yuan. He was angry, and he also hated it.
Migrant workers are now an extremely hot topic. From top to bottom, all relevant departments and relevant personnel pay attention with great enthusiasm to this both common and special group, migrant workers. But the topic no one cares about is: who is farming the land now? Ten years from now, twenty years from now, who will still farm the land? Anyone closely connected or linked to the most grassroots rural areas (for example, having parents, brothers or relatives and friends in rural areas) knows that the people farming the vast yellow earth today are mostly middle-aged and elderly people over forty. Young men and women under forty, especially under thirty-five, are nowhere to be seen on the yellow earth. These young people under thirty-five make up a very large proportion of migrant workers; this is a fact. Since land was allocated to households, farmers have had the right to farm land freely, and thus there was surplus labor, and thus there was the group that goes to cities to work. During this period these migrant workers played a very great role in both urban development and the improvement of rural farmers' own economic conditions, and made great contributions. In the blink of an eye, more than thirty years of reform and opening up have passed. In rural areas, some farmers who earned some money working elsewhere long ago no longer want the land that was once in their names in their hometowns; they are already city people with neither beginning nor end. Most people travel back and forth between the cities where they work and the countryside. They work elsewhere, while the land at home is farmed by their fathers' generation or grandfathers' generation. There is almost no such family: everyone in the family farming at home. No young person is willing to live on the yellow earth like their fathers or grandfathers, facing the yellow earth with their backs to the sky, and their fathers do not want their descendants to live the same life they did.
In rural areas, among young men and women under thirty-five, few still know how to do those farm chores, and they are unwilling to do such hard farm work. Now their fathers' and grandfathers' generations do those most basic farm chores, but in another ten or twenty years, when today's main force of migrant workers grows old and returns home, one may ask: who then will still go to rural areas to do those most basic farm chores? Could technology become so advanced that rice can grow in the fields without human labor? And the current form in which land is allocated to each household is not suited to large-scale mechanized farming. I think most answers would be: no. Of course this includes myself. It is no longer news that rural people born in the 1980s do not know how to farm; there is no need to count them one by one. Farming is no longer seen by us as the main occupation. A friend who has gone out to work said this: "I just like the city and yearn for nightlife. Even if I starve to death in the city, I will not go home to farm." Of course what he said may be somewhat extreme, but I am not really a farmer; I am a true rural person, because I do not know how to farm. Farmers are the highest occupation; it can be said they rule the whole world, providing clothing, food, housing and transportation. What a noble position, how admirable! But it is an occupation that people do not yearn for, and many even say, what worthless people farmers are! They attack farmers from all sides, and also make more young people afraid to join, or even reject it. Of course I do not rule out that many people yearn for the city. The post-80s migrant workers no longer regard working away from home as temporary work, nor, like the post-60s and post-70s, regard working away from home as going out during the slack season to earn a little to supplement the household. We use working away from home as a pretext, weaving any lies to stay in the city, trying every means to escape a body flowing with farmers' blood, to escape the posture of facing the yellow earth with our backs to the sky, at any cost. Our ancestors for generations will all face the same trouble, and so will our parents.
They have dealt with farmland for a lifetime. They worry about their successors. They do not want farmland to rest in their hands just like that, but they also do not want their descendants to inherit their occupation and be farmers like them. They hope their descendants can go out and live a better life, not like themselves. This is a very complex society, a rapidly developing society. For migrant workers like us with little education, it is very hard to keep up with the rhythm; we can derail at any time, and will all face returning home. And we who do not know how to farm will face new challenges when we go back. Society has developed, technology has advanced, and farmers' labor efficiency has improved. They can free up more time for side businesses or to work elsewhere. This is a good thing. But using advanced technology to destroy forests and open wasteland, damaging the ecology, how will we face future generations? Who can see these words? I do not know. Who can make decisions for farmers on such matters? I do not know.
Why do so many of the state's policies benefiting agriculture become completely distorted by the county and township level, and who is responsible? I do not know. Why are farmers still so bitter? Is it because they live at the very bottom of the biological chain? I do not know. Food is the first necessity of the people! China, which calls itself a major agricultural country, has in recent years ruined rural areas beyond recognition, and the agricultural foundation on which more than a billion people depend for survival has been almost completely destroyed! Small and medium-sized water conservancy works built painstakingly over decades have all been destroyed in an instant! Not even a bit of disaster resistance remains! A slight climate anomaly triggers large-scale disasters. Floods, droughts, mudslides and snow disasters occur year after year. We are destroying our own Great Wall!!! It is all man-made! The environment is almost completely destroyed! The ecological balance is almost completely destroyed! Destroying farmland to build cities, destroying farmland to build university towns, destroying farmland to create GDP, destroying the foundation of survival of more than a billion people! This is simply a crime for the ages!!! It is not regression, it is destruction!!! It is non-renewable, irreversible destruction!!!
How to solve the problem of who will farm the land and who will raise pigs is also a problem that the Ministry of Agriculture and other relevant departments must strive to solve in the coming years. I have deep personal experience of the difficulty farmers face in growing grain. Many farmers no longer farm or raise pigs, and large areas of farmland are left fallow.
The main reason is that farmers get no returns from growing grain or raising pigs. Originally, after farmers grow grain and deduct seeds, pesticides and fertilizer, almost nothing is left, and some even lose money. And there is also a practical problem: "Farmers have to hire people both to grow and harvest grain. One person costs 100 yuan a day, plus three meals, and the meals must include chicken and meat. Some elderly people without labor capacity feel it is too uneconomical, so they can only rent the cultivated land to others." Even if the rent is very low or not charged at all, in fact, very few people are willing to rent land to farm. More than 90% of young people go to cities to work, and rural areas basically have no labor force left. Some farmers even plant eucalyptus trees in rice fields. There is something even more heartbreaking. "Once the roots of this tree extend into the soil, they are especially able to absorb water and suck all the water in the rice field dry. Local farmers say that once eucalyptus is planted, no grain can be grown for thirty years."
Compared with the new requirements of building modern agriculture and the international advanced level, China's agricultural science and technology still lag far behind. This is prominently shown in the "three deficiencies": first, insufficient supply of innovative achievements. Second, insufficient agricultural technology extension services. Third, insufficient total agricultural talent. Agricultural research lacks leading talent, and the aging of grassroots agricultural technicians is prominent. Large numbers of young and middle-aged rural laborers go to cities to work, and "who will farm the land" and "who will raise pigs" in rural areas have become unavoidable serious problems.
Young farmers would rather do the most tiring, hardest and even dirtiest work in the city than go home to farm. The fundamental reason is that farming is not only hard, but hard work still does not earn money. Farmers mostly depend on the weather to farm. In a good year there is still a little profit; in a year of floods or drought, they may lose money or even harvest nothing. But if they go out to work, no matter how low the wage, there is still monthly income. One laborer farming 10 mu of grain for a year has a net income of about 2,000 yuan, less than a month's wage from working elsewhere.
It cannot be ignored that the unwillingness to farm also has an intergenerational transmission effect. Most rural youth today have lost farming skills and find it hard to return to rural areas to be farmers, and this influence will extend to the next generation. To solve the problem of who will farm the land, the most important thing is to solve the problem of whether farmers can make money by farming. If farming at home could lead to a happy life, who would be willing to leave home and parents and children, with husband and wife living like the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, and travel thousands of miles to work elsewhere? A farmer told me that his family of 5 has 2.9 mu of land. Growing one season of rice is enough to eat for a year and a half. He did the math: hiring labor, plus money for pesticides, fertilizer and seeds, costs more than 1,900 yuan. He harvested 2,500 jin of grain and sold 100 jin for 110 yuan. Even if all the grain were sold, it would be only about 2,750 yuan, and after deducting costs he would earn only 850 yuan, while the family still has to eat 1,000 jin. If they only grow grain, there is no money for clothes and no per capita spending. Farming does not make money, so more and more land is left fallow. CCTV's "Economic Half Hour" did a special program, "Investigation of Abandoned Farmland in Sichuan: Grain Prices Rise but Farming Actually Loses Money." In the footage we saw 70-year-old Li Junhua in Huangjiaowan Village, Leshan Town, Wusheng County, Sichuan Province. A piece of his family's land was overgrown with weeds. The old man said both his sons felt farming was not worth it, so they went to other provinces to work, the land had been abandoned for 6 years, and the farm tools at home were now covered with rust. Peng Guohua, deputy director of the Wusheng County Agriculture Bureau in Sichuan Province, said they investigated abandoned cultivated land across the county and found that the county had about 32,000 mu of abandoned cultivated land. Farming does not make money, mainly because grain prices are low and the cost of growing grain has increased. The rise in grain prices and the increase in grain subsidies have never outrun the leg of rising production material prices. In other words, every year's rise in grain prices is not enough to offset the rise in production costs.
Under this pressure, farmers have no choice but to leave land fallow. Grain prices cannot outrun the leg of rising production material prices because grain price increases are slow. China is still in an era of cheap grain, which is related to the state's setting of the minimum grain purchase price. Of course the state sets the grain purchase price low out of consideration for prices and stability, but setting it too low, and another part being swallowed in a big bite by middlemen under unified purchase and sale! This not only dampens farmers' enthusiasm for growing grain, but also further widens the urban-rural gap and the rich-poor gap. In 1990, China's grain (rice) purchase price was 0.22-0.24 yuan/jin, and in 2011 the minimum grain (rice) purchase price was 1-1.1 yuan/jin, only about 4 times higher. But in the same period production material prices rose more than 20 times. Across the country, civil servants' wages in the same period rose by roughly 40-60 times. China implements a minimum grain purchase price in order to protect the interests of grain-growing farmers, but in fact it is a kind of restraint on farmers, causing grain prices to remain low, and low prices can only mean meager profits from grain growing. The fundamental way is to start by raising farmers' enthusiasm for farming, and this serious problem must be solved. If the minimum purchase price cannot be raised substantially, then subsidies for farmers growing grain must be increased, and in particular the various markets must be coordinated and the prices of seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other materials must be well regulated. If the problem cannot be solved so that farmers can support their families and live a good life by farming, then who will farm the land will remain a serious problem.
Children's curiosity about rural areas contrasts with modern young people's separation from agriculture and their estrangement from the land, and at the same time reflects the shortcomings of modern education and the weak points of quality education. When quality education is mentioned, people often think of music, chess, calligraphy, painting, singing and dancing. In fact, farming is also quality education. But the vast majority of children cannot tell the five grains apart. Children can distinguish roses from Chinese roses, but cannot distinguish wheat from chives. Being far from labor also directly leads to idle limbs. Many children cannot carry things in their hands, bear things on their shoulders, or carry things on their backs. Being far from agricultural labor also keeps children far from a simple affection for food, and various kinds of waste are heartbreaking. If children have never sweated and suffered in the fields, it is hard for them to understand the true meaning of "every single grain is the fruit of hard work." Being far from agricultural labor has made cities and the countryside lose a very good bond. Many city children look down on rural areas and on farmers, building an invisible separation wall between city and countryside. Being far from agricultural labor has left agriculture without successors. A survey of 100 students in four townships in a county in Shaanxi Province showed that 96% of students were unwilling to become farmers after graduation, so some people sighed, "A major agricultural country, who will be farmers in the future?" You speak for migrant workers, and he speaks for migrant workers, as if they were all spokespeople for migrant workers, and they are all very noble. But have they ever thought that workers must work and farmers must farm; otherwise, what will more than a billion people wear? What will they use? What will they eat? If everyone comes to the city to work and build houses, today's city people...
Who will farm the land? After all, we cannot always live by "eating" houses, right? A few years ago, the average age of people farming in the United States was 58, and young people had gone to the cities. The United States farms with a high degree of mechanization, different from China's scattered farming method, but Americans themselves are also very worried about this. What they practice is also urbanization, and all day long what people hear about is urbanization. But what about rural areas? China's rural land is collectively owned and allocated to farmers for cultivation for a fixed term, rather than sold to farmers. Once land is allocated to households, it is quite difficult to achieve large-scale planting and management. In rural areas, anyone with even a little ability to go out and make money rushes to the cities. In today's rural areas, how many able-bodied workers are still willing to stay in the countryside farming those few mu of land? In some places, even if one wants to farm, there is no land left to farm. There is construction here too. The problem is not only that strong and able-bodied people do not want to farm. There is construction there too, and there is nothing wrong with that; the economy must develop, and that is inevitable. It is just that encouraging everyone to live in big houses is not quite right. Our country is after all a developing country, with a considerable gap from developed countries! Our per capita income is 3,000 US dollars, while developed countries are at 50,000 US dollars. How many square meters is the per capita housing area in developed countries? Not everyone in developed countries lives in a house with their own property rights either, right? Our local governments, for economic development, for selling land at high prices, and for their own term's achievements, desperately sell land and build houses; developers desperately drive up housing prices, and no one knows what methods they use, but in any case, wherever they surge, housing prices there rise desperately! Building houses requires people, right? Labor has also become valuable. Working as a laborer at a construction site can earn far more money than farming in rural areas! More than a billion people all have to eat, right? Not to mention competing for labor, building houses. But the building has gone crazy, and they even dare to take farmland to build houses! Are not some small property-rights houses on agricultural land? Farmers have gone to the cities, their allocated land is still there, they can still get subsidies, their houses are still there, and some are just left idle. The waste of resources is quite serious.
Letting children get close to the fields and experience farming is not only to avoid a "shortage of successors" among farmers, but more importantly to build up their physique and willpower, to let them feel the hardships of farmers, to know that grain does not come easily, to deepen their bond with the "three rural issues" of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, and to improve their qualities in all respects. Sichuan is a land of rice and fish, yet so much good farmland is wasted for nothing, which is truly a great pity; if this continues, the country's food security cannot be guaranteed. But if the problem of abandoned farmland is not solved, it will be very hard to keep going. "The price of grain is too low, farmers make no profit, so how can they settle down to farm? Only if farmers' enthusiasm for growing grain can be aroused and some of the migrant workers are drawn back can the problem of abandoned farmland be solved."
Only by expanding domestic consumer demand, speeding up the improvement of the social security system covering both urban and rural areas, and promoting the building of a harmonious society and the long-term stability and peace of the country, can it be of great significance.