In the three rural issues, respecting objective laws and excessive innovation are incompatible
Nongdi Quan has recently seen all kinds of agricultural innovation on the market, and combined with many years of agricultural practice, I have a vague sense of a problem: is excessive agricultural innovation a good phenomenon?
Some things are stable and unchanging, not shifted by human will, and these are laws. "Innovation" that violates laws often creates disaster.
Of course, it is not that some people deliberately create disaster; they simply do not know what laws are, or perhaps they think they have grasped the laws, when in fact what they understand is not the laws of things.
1. What laws does agricultural production have?
Agricultural production must follow many laws: economic, biological, natural, social and cultural. Looking at agriculture from only a single perspective is likely to be one-sided.
There is another law in agriculture: worldwide, it is hard to find cases of becoming rich through agriculture, and developed countries all provide large subsidies to large-scale agriculture. This all confirms one law: agriculture is a primary industry with very low economic returns, and if judged purely by economic returns, it is far below the secondary and tertiary industries. This is a law, and it is also a necessary condition for the effectiveness of national land use regulation.
Therefore, Nongdi Quan has always despised the various enterprises on the market that boast that agriculture is about to become a hugely profitable industry, or that excessively mislead ordinary people with talk of this innovation and that innovation. Enterprises certainly need to make a profit, but they must also possess the most basic moral bottom line, and must not rely on that little bit of knowledge advantage to mislead farmers for the sake of short-term corporate interests. After all, the huge knowledge gap makes farmers very easy to deceive and intimidate.
China's three rural issues certainly must pursue efficiency, but they cannot pursue efficiency alone, because the domestic three rural issues have their own particularities. For farmers and rural areas, agriculture is not merely an occupation; it also means security, stability and more.
The reason the household contract responsibility system more than 30 years ago unleashed enormous energy, started and drove China's reform and rapid development, and quickly solved the transition from hunger to having enough to eat, what exactly was the reason, what brought such enormous force? In other words, what exactly was the essential experience of Xiaogang Village's reform? Different disciplines may have different understandings and explanations. But one point is consensus: it solved the problem of "farmers laboring for themselves." The characteristics of agriculture determine that only when one labors for oneself can the highest labor efficiency be achieved. This is the most precious experience Xiaogang Village left us for developing agriculture.
2. Has family management become outdated?
Unfortunately, disturbed by all sorts of chaotic theories, today's Xiaogang Village may already have changed and abandoned this precious wealth of regularity, because they have not recognized the wealth value of this experience.
With social development, household management has indeed encountered all kinds of problems. Some people have begun to doubt whether family management is outdated, and even begun to accuse the allocation of land to households of being wrong, and have cited cases of common prosperity along the collectivization path to deny family management.
People with this view and understanding, please answer one question from Nongdi Quan: please find a typical example anywhere in the world of becoming rich by growing grain through collectivization alone without relying on subsidies, and come out and walk two steps? If you think you can find one, I suggest you first conduct field research on the ground and then study it carefully.
But Nongdi Quan can find wealthy self-employed individual businesses anywhere. Because, in fact, those wealthy "collectives" became wealthy by developing industry and commerce, not by everyone growing corn and wheat together. And the reason the incomes of households represented by Xiaogang Village have long failed to improve is that they persisted for a long time in farming, an occupation in which one contributes to the country and society but obtains no benefit for oneself. That is what economists call the externality problem. This is determined by the different nature of agriculture and industry, not by the difference between collective and individual.
3. One bottom line that agricultural reform must uphold is insisting that farmers labor for themselves
So how can the problems of household management be solved, so that agriculture moves toward sustainable development and farmers' incomes are effectively increased? There is only one law, but there can be many paths. This law is to uphold the bottom line of household management, and let farmers labor for themselves.
To this end, the central government has upheld a series of institutions and policies to stabilize contractual relations, from keeping contractual relations unchanged for 15 years, to unchanged for 30 years, and then to unchanged for the long term. In order to keep them unchanged for the long term, it also implemented the work of confirming rights and issuing certificates for farmers. The purpose is to stabilize farmers' rights to cultivated land, and on this basis let those who farm feel at ease farming, without worrying that their land may be arbitrarily infringed upon. Those who have already entered the cities or lost the ability to work may, on a voluntary basis, withdraw from or transfer land to those who farm, thus achieving the scaling up of family management, namely family farms. As operating units that mainly use family labor, family farms still follow the law of farmers laboring for themselves, and are therefore an ideal trend for agricultural development.
4. Discordant voices and pseudo-innovation in reform have appeared in the three rural market!
However, the correct path of upholding the bottom line of household management has been disturbed by all sides, and agriculture in many places has already gone astray.
First, some so-called scholars, with theories learned from who knows where, talk grandly about ways to get rich in agriculture, incite capital to contract land in an attempt to get rich, and the result is of course hitting walls everywhere, then engaging in non-agriculturalization, harming farmers and society.
Some grassroots officials always think of manipulating land themselves, and have invented the method of taking land back into collective ownership and obtaining "collective" income by contracting it out year after year, until, because agricultural returns are low, it can no longer be contracted out, or the land is non-agriculturalized, or the enterprise goes bankrupt and closes.
Of course, there are also some officials who collude with capital to enclose land, using the name of so-called "modern agriculture" to obtain national subsidies, attempting to change land use to engage in real estate. When this path is blocked, the result is large government subsidies creating large-scale abandoned land. This phenomenon can be seen everywhere in all regions.
Of course, there is also the media adding fuel to the fire, creating lies about getting rich through agriculture, publicizing isolated cases as universal facts, and publicizing predatory capital management and unsustainable agriculture as typical modern agriculture. This has also seriously misled people's understanding of agriculture and objectively deceived investors and entrepreneurs.
Someone asks, does agricultural development have new laws? Nongdi Quan believes: there are no new laws. People still lack understanding of the inherent laws of agriculture, and even engage in large-scale innovation on the premise of not knowing what agriculture is, so failure and absurdity are inevitable.
5. Family management has ten irreplaceable advantages!
Family farms are the inevitable choice of household management. Family farms have ten advantages:
l It helps raise labor efficiency. Farmers laboring for themselves show a high sense of responsibility and conscientiousness;
l It helps achieve moderate-scale operation. The scale of a family farm is moderate scale. That is, the lower limit is the subsistence standard, and the upper limit is the largest scale that the existing technical level of the family labor force can reach;
l It helps raise farmers' incomes and social status. It achieves stable and full employment for farmers;
l It helps long-term investment. Contractual relations remain unchanged for the long term, can be inherited, transferred and withdrawn from, rights and interests are not infringed upon, and there are long-term operating expectations;
l It helps protect cultivated land and sustainable development;
l It helps inherit and develop excellent agricultural culture;
l It helps the application of agricultural science and technology;
l It helps the formation of agricultural organizations;
l It helps the state identify and effectively support agriculture;
l It helps national agricultural security.
People with common agricultural knowledge can understand these advantages, so I will not repeat them.
6. The speed and rate of land transfer are by no means indicators reflecting agricultural modernity; excessive intervention will trigger social problems
To develop moderate-scale family farms, where does the cultivated land come from?
Cultivated land comes from transfer by households that abandon agriculture. Some people go to work in the cities and cannot attend to agriculture, so they transfer the land to those who farm, letting those who farm cultivate more land.
This process happens naturally and is a slow process. Do not try to complete land transfer in a single morning.
The speed and rate of land transfer cannot reflect agricultural modernity; a speed of transfer driven by human effort is only an indicator that triggers social problems。
Cultivated land has two major functions: for the country and society, cultivated land has the function of agricultural security, so the red line of cultivated land must be protected, the use of cultivated land must be prescribed, permanent basic farmland must be designated, and strict land use regulation must be implemented. This is so in every country; agricultural production cannot be regulated by the so-called market.
For farmers, cultivated land is an important guarantee of their livelihood and the basic condition for achieving farmers' employment, income and maintenance of life. As long as farmers have not obtained complete social security, cultivated land cannot be taken from them. Without complete security, no matter what reason or what condition is used to force farmers to give up land, it is a crime against farmers and directly creates social problems. Those land-lost farmers who received high compensation are at best wealthy poor people who have lost social life.
At the same time, it must also be seen that those who already have complete social security conditions should withdraw without compensation, or at least transfer their land at a low price, for farmers to use long term. The slogans and practices that advocate property income from agricultural land and claim that farmers will benefit from high land rents essentially harm farmers' fundamental interests, harm national agricultural security, and also harm agricultural investors. Because in fact no entity can benefit from it. This year's phenomenon of large-scale operations withdrawing from leases has already gradually exposed this problem.
Finally, Nongdi Quan wants to say one thing: return the land to the farmers. Agriculture without farmers is dangerous and unsustainable agriculture, or at least agriculture that must pay a huge price. Industrial-style large-scale agriculture may be an inevitable trend under contemporary culture, but it is by no means an ideal result or an inevitable choice.