China's agricultural modernization targeting at farmers' benefit

How to approach the agricultural modernization?
Who is going to facilitate it?
How will the future countryside look like?

A few days ago, Minister Han Changfu addressed these issues in an interview to Xinhua.

The 18th Communist Party Congress called for simultaneous development between industrialization, informatization, urbanization and agricultural modernization. What is the objective of agricultural modernization?

The implementation of industrialization, informatization, urbanization and agricultural modernization will be an important milestone in China’s modernization process. At present agricultural modernization is falling behind, where the new countryside initiative, farmers’ income, farmers’ education and legal rights are not taken good care of. If China wants to speed up the industrialization and urbanization, then more effort needs to be made on the agricultural modernization, otherwise development will not be stable.

China’s agricultural modernization should firstly ensure safe supply of food and farming product to over 1 billion population; secondly to ensure farmers’ well-off life so that they can also enjoy the resulting benefit from the industrialization, informatization, urbanization and agricultural modernization. From government perspective, we will ensure that China’s agricultural modernization will not only solve agricultural issues, but also to solve farmer-related issues, as well as countryside issues.

We need to have a good command of food supply for ourselves, which is a bottom line; of course we don’t refuse help from others in respect of food safety; food may be imported as appropriate while major supply will rely on ourselves.

The definition of grain in western countries refers to 3 cereals – wheat, rice and corn, which however in China’s case would also include soy, and potato series. At present China’s self-sufficiency rate of the 3 cereals reaches 98%, while rice and wheat are mostly imported for varieties assortment, additionally more corn will be imported gradually carried due to increased forage demand as a result of increased consumptions of meat, egg and milk. Furthermore, corn industry has a long product chain, which covers thousands of varieties leading to extended processing of corn derivatives according to new demand.

Compared with western countries, China has a larger rural population and a weak agricultural foundation. How will China’s agricultural modernizationdeal with these factors; or in another words, to what extent will rural population be reduced? Since agricultural modernization is understood as a reduction of farmers?

China’s agricultural modernization needs to take into account Chinese characteristics. China is different from the large-scale agricultural modernization in developed countries like the US, where they have more agriculture resources, which are backed by strong industries and urban development; China is also different from that of Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, where they have smaller number of farmer population. China’s economy is in history developed based on so-called “small-farmers’ economy”, we could not find practical references to follow for a country with such a huge farmer population toward agricultural modernization. A unique feature of our country decides that our agricultural modernization should not go too fast, neither too slow, but should be taken up moderately on a long process basis.

Without proper scale, it will be difficult to develop the agricultural modernization, which requires machinery and market supported operations; therefore China’s agriculture must go for scale operation, which however will involve re-location of large number of farmer population. If farmers are not relocated to become urban population, the centralized land operation will make farmers lose land causing serious social problems. The speed and extent of scale operations should be carried out in line with farmers’ relocation process in a proper,natural and moderate manner; aggressive planning and compulsory relocation should be avoided.

With the progressing of the agricultural modernization, rural population is sure to come down, but not down to the same level of western countries. By 2030 China’s population is expected to reach 1.5 billion, by which time the urbanization rate may have reached 70%, meaning that there will be still 400 – 450 million people in the countryside including 200 million labors, among which farming labor accounts for about 40 – 50 million, while the others would be employed for husbandry, farm-product preliminary processing, storage, transport and marketing.

Central government’s “No.1 Resolution” requests development of family farm. What is the difference between China’s family farm and that of western countries?

Family farm is the main farming mode in western countries, which is family characteristic. Family farm can use both traditional production mode and modern production mode, so the mode of family farming does not have to change because of the agricultural modernization.

China will develop family farm on the basis of its past family contracting operation mode; China’s family farm needs to give special consideration to the scale of operation. The scale of family farm in the US can easily reach a scale of thousands of Mu while in China such a large scale will not be possible. At present each family handles only half of hectare of land; in case that 1 family can farm 1,000 hectares of land, which means 1 single family does the job for 2,000 families, in which case others will have no job to do. So in China it is a long process to find the right approach because the scale of operation is decided by the special characteristics of China.

Family farming also needs to consider supportive policies and measures. For example, will the family operation be a legal entity? Are there any incentives or guidelines? Particularly there is a need of social service. In western countries, social service is readily available to family farming, like if a tractor breaks down, one phone call will solve the problem, so is the professional chemical application service. In China there is still a big gap in this regard.

Over recent years, more and more business entities have stepped into agriculture; then will there be a change in the functions of farmers? How will an enterprise interface with farmers?

To develop agricultural modernization requires training of new business players. Who are the players? I think this should be farmers. If they are excluded from the players list, agricultural modernization will not be achieved, and existing issues with farmers would still remain unsolved.

Effort should be made to train and support growers and cooperatives, who will be invited to be the main players, and the land should be centralized and made available to them. New occupational farmers-based business organization, social services and industry leaders will form the new business system for the agricultural modernization.

We welcome and encourage enterprises’ investment in agriculture, which however needs to be integrated with growers, family farms and special cooperatives. Enterprises may not engage in planting or growing, instead they could participate in production-related service, seedling, processing and marketing in a close collaboration with large growers and family farms on the basis of mutual benefit and win-win development.