Is there really "unmanned farming" in China's rural areas?

What kind of fields are uninhabited?

On May 26th, General Secretary Xi Jinping gave important instructions on the current farmland policy, stressing that cultivated land should be protected like giant pandas: on the one hand, we should strictly balance the occupation and compensation of cultivated land and adhere to the red line of cultivated land; on the other hand, we should standardize land circulation and prevent the great leap forward in land transfer. In recent years, the focus of the central agricultural work is to build a new agricultural management system. In the process of implementing the policy, many local governments unilaterally interpret the new agricultural management system as the expansion of agricultural operation scale, and it is common for local governments to help industrial and commercial capital go to the countryside to transfer land from the hands of farmers, resulting in the great leap forward in land transfer.

According to statistics, the national land transfer was 11% in 2009, and now the proportion has risen to about 30%. According to the rate of population transfer, the number of migrant workers was less than 230 million in 2009 and more than 270 million in 2014. The growth rate of rural land transfer is faster than that of migrant workers, and rural land circulation shows an obvious accelerating trend. The situation of land transfer varies from region to region. An obvious paradox is that in some areas with good production conditions, flat terrain, concentrated plots and good water conservancy conditions, the proportion of land transfer is high, while in some mountainous and hilly areas, the proportion of land transfer is not only high, but also low. The author's hometown is the Dabie Mountains in the south of Henan Province. When he returned to his hometown during the Spring Festival, some villagers complained about the inaction of the local government and why they did not introduce enterprise bosses to transfer the land, so that they could get rent without working. According to a preliminary estimate, there are nearly 30% of the land abandoned in mountainous areas like our hometown. The most direct reason for the abandonment of land is that the land is fragmented, the water conservancy conditions are poor, it is impossible to work mechanized, and the farming conditions carried by people make many people unwilling to cultivate land. In fact, no one is willing to grow the abandoned land in the hills and mountainous areas for free, so how can there be an enterprise boss to contract it?

On the contrary, there is little land abandonment in plain areas, such as North China Plain, Northeast China, Jianghan Plain and so on. These areas have good farming conditions, high degree of mechanization, less effort and profit in farming, so farmers are willing to plant. It is only in these areas where the fields are better planted that industrial and commercial capital is willing to plant, and it is in these areas that the government and enterprises can join forces to promote land transfer.

Take a city in central China as an example, the city has a total of about 3 million mu of arable land, of which more than 1.7 million mu has been transferred, of which a single main body has a circulation scale of more than 1,000 mu, and the circulation area of leading enterprises dominated by industrial and commercial capital is 1.2111 million mu, accounting for 69.4%. The rest are farmers-based farmers, family farms and other circulation. According to the investigation in the city, it is found that there are two remarkable characteristics of the current land transfer: first, the government policy tendency and financial support are the main reasons to promote the rapid land transfer; second, the land inflow is dominated by industrial and commercial capital, and their actual agricultural management capacity is insufficient.

In recent years, the city has issued a series of preferential policies to guide land transfer and invested a large amount of financial funds. The staff of the agricultural department in a district under the jurisdiction of the city reported that among the beneficiaries of financial funds invested in agricultural exports in the area, the share of industrial and commercial capital, family farms and traditional small farmers was 7:2:1, and industrial and commercial enterprises with large-scale transfer of land were the main beneficiaries of financial funds. In order to guide land transfer, the local government has set a clear limit on the scale of operation when formulating policies and capital investments. for example, at least 100 mu or more can get special subsidies for "family farms". For example, since 2013, around the construction of the "vegetable basket" project, the government has invested hundreds of millions of yuan in financial funds to support the establishment of a vegetable base for standardized production, mainly by subsidizing steel sheds and infrastructure. It is stipulated that the subsidy of more than 15000 yuan per mu of greenhouse, coupled with land formation subsidy, can basically cover the cost of building greenhouse. However, in the project examination and approval, the construction scale is required to be more than 1000 mu in order to obtain project funds, which is to exclude traditional farmers and vegetable growers. After almost all industrial and commercial enterprises apply to the government for funds to build the greenhouse, they will contract out the greenhouse to farmers for operation, and the industrial and commercial enterprises themselves are basically not directly engaged in production activities. In addition to such direct subsidies, other central and provincial and municipal agriculture-related projects, such as high-standard farmland renovation project funds, small-scale agricultural water project funds, and comprehensive agricultural development project funds, generally give priority to the coverage of these transferred land areas.

Big farms don't make money if they are popular.

There are two reasons why local governments actively promote land transfer and support industrial and commercial enterprises to transfer land in policy. First, the goal of the new agricultural management system put forward by the central government a few years ago is not clear. Local governments focus on the scale of operation, and some local governments even take the scale and proportion of land transfer as assessment indicators and political achievement projects. artificially promote the great leap forward in land circulation. Second, with the weakening of the management and mobilization capacity of rural grass-roots organizations, local governments generally have the problems of difficult and high cost to deal with small farmers. A remarkable change is that in the past, the central and western rural areas not only set up "seven stations and eight" such as water conservancy stations and agricultural machinery and agricultural technology service stations at the township level, but also played an overall role in agricultural production at the two levels of the village group. Since the abolition of agricultural taxes and fees, in a few areas, such as Hubei Province, the "seven stations and eight institutes" have been abolished, the grass-roots service departments in most areas have also shown a trend of stratification, and the two levels of villages and groups have gradually withdrawn from the links of agricultural production. Agricultural production has completely become a household thing. At present, in addition to some of the national funds gradually increasing every year to farmers' accounts through direct subsidy cards, there are also many funds that require overall use. For example, 600 billion of the funds for land formation are planned to be invested by the state during the 12th five-year Plan period. Land, water conservancy, roads and other financial funds to improve agricultural infrastructure involve the interests of thousands of small farmers in the process of investment, which is very troublesome. Unable to deal with tens of thousands of farmers, the local government hopes to transform one-third of a mu of small farmers into hundreds of thousands of acres of large farms like the United States through the transformation of operators. Compared with the investment to small farmers with one mu and three acres of land, the government can improve infrastructure such as hydropower ditches and roads for a farm with a single business entity, which is not only low in cost, but also easy to be effective in capital investment.

Serving small farmers is not only ineffective, but also very troublesome. This is why it is not easy to grasp the eyebrows of the beard, but it is easy to braid the hair. Since the implementation of the household contract responsibility system, the farmland system, tax and fee system, and grass-roots organizations have all developed in the direction of more and more scattered agriculture, and things will turn back at the extreme. Finally, small farmers are scattered to the point where they can hardly operate. And the transaction cost of government services for small farmers is almost unbearable. In the face of this, the power to expand the main body of agricultural management naturally appears in local practice, and the Great Leap forward of land circulation is the form of expression.

The problem is that the transfer of industrial and commercial capital to land cannot improve the efficiency of agricultural production. It is a consensus in the field of agricultural economics that the land output rate of large farms is lower than that of small farmers, which is also proved by some empirical studies. Our survey in rural areas found that the grain yield per unit area after the transfer of land by enterprises is at least 10% lower than that of small farmers. At present, the basic goal of China's agricultural policy is to ensure the safety of food production, to maintain or improve the land output rate is the basic requirement of innovative agricultural management system. At present, the transfer of land by many industrial and commercial enterprises is not only driven by policies, but also related to the early lack of understanding of the laws of agricultural production and unclear positioning. Many peasant entrepreneurs who engage in projects, factories and construction abroad return to their hometown to contract land under the encouragement of the local government, and some of them barely survive under the subsidy of the local government, and most of them lose all their money after contracting for a few years. In the survey, we did not see a large-scale contract of farmers' land to engage in grain production and can be successfully maintained. In a district under a city in central China mentioned above, there are more than a dozen farms with a single scale of several thousand mu along the national highway, which are basically invested by real estate enterprises. One of the typical local farms is a few hundred mu of abandoned land in remote areas that cannot be reached by leaders. People familiar with the matter said: "the more you plant, the more you lose, and the annual turnover fee per mu is only 800 yuan per mu of abandoned species." These real estate developers transfer land has a strong "enclosure" speculation motivation.

The per unit yield of enterprises is lower than that of farmers, and the costs are similar to those of farmers, and they have to pay more than 500 yuan in rent, while farmers only "earn labor fees and hard work fees." then unless the industrial and commercial capital transfer land is changed its use or planted cash crops, otherwise it will not be profitable. If the Government does not take care of it in terms of policy or finance, most industrial and commercial enterprises will withdraw soon after the transfer of land because they cannot make a profit. The problem is that the current central policy is misled by the question of "who will farm?"

"unmanned farming" is a fake problem.

Theorists and the media are generally worried about "unmanned farming". This is a completely fake question. The rural labor force of our country is about 400 million, at present, there are only 270 million migrant workers in our country, and there will be more than 100 million rural labor force for a long time in the future. With 100 million rural labor force and 1.8 billion mu of arable land, how can there be no one to cultivate land? The intuitive phenomenon associated with concerns about "unmanned land" is the abandonment of land in the hometown around the masses. The question is, in which area is the land abandoned? Are there any wastelands in the North China Plain, the Jianghan Plain and the Northeast? What is actually abandoned is the mountainous and hilly areas like the author's hometown. The land in these areas is caused by the inability to cultivate the land after the destruction of the current agricultural production infrastructure. If the farming conditions are not improved, the land in these areas will not be cultivated for free, and there will be no industrial and commercial capital to be transferred (unless it is a special crop such as medicinal herbs). In other words, the problem of abandoned land caused by poor farming conditions is not that there is no one to cultivate the land, but there is no way to cultivate it. The way to solve the problem is not to introduce industrial and commercial capital to transfer land, but to improve infrastructure to provide farmers with convenient conditions for farming.

Common sense misunderstandings such as "unmanned farming" and "abandoned land" are widely popular and, to a certain extent, mislead policy makers. Worried about food security, the central government encouraged local governments to innovate the agricultural management system and increased capital investment. as a result, local governments joined industrial and commercial capital to transfer land.

The Great Leap forward in land transfer has two consequences. First, the employment opportunities of farmers are squeezed as a result of land transfer. Before the local government promoted the land transfer, there was a widespread phenomenon of spontaneous land transfer among relatives, neighbors and friends in the village. for example, I went out to work and planted the land for you, and when I came home for the Spring Festival, you just gave me a bag of rice and a pot of oil to eat for the Spring Festival. this is a human relationship. Some theorists believe that such land transfer can not bring "property income", so it requires formal land transfer, formal contracts and various property rights exchanges. After the emergence of the formal land transfer market, the land rent rose, 500 yuan per mu or even higher, those human relations did not work in the past, the transfer of land must pay land rent. As a result, a group of people who used to farm in the village were excluded from the field of agricultural production. This group of people, we call them "backbone farmers", are the "elites" among the rural left-behind groups after the outflow of rural people and property. They maintain a well-off life by picking up dozens of mu of other people's land, and by the way, they also act as village cadres and group leaders, assume the role of caregivers for the elderly and children left behind in rural areas, cope with rural law and order, and become the main body for maintaining the basic order in fragile rural areas. Before industrial and commercial enterprises entered the village, this kind of "backbone farmers" existed in every natural village, and their existence was very important. After the industrial and commercial enterprises entered the village, this group of farmers were also driven to the cities, leaving the old, weak, women and children completely behind in the countryside, and there were major problems in maintaining order at the grass-roots level.

Another negative consequence is that the land output rate of large farms is low, and when industrial and commercial enterprises become the main body of operation, food security is not guaranteed. A more far-reaching impact is that when policies, systems, and grass-roots service systems are re-set up around the industrial and commercial enterprises that transfer land, the agricultural socialized service system that supports the family production of traditional small farmers will disintegrate and a new agricultural service system will be formed. The result is that the agricultural production mode with the family as the core is unable to return while the big farm method is inefficient, and finally there is the possibility that the policy will be kidnapped. At present, the central government's proposal to prevent the Great Leap forward in land transfer is not only to prohibit local governments from helping industrial and commercial capital to transfer land from farmers, but also requires local governments not to ignore the traditional family agricultural production mode and its needs in agricultural work. In the aspects of the improvement of the land system, the supply of agricultural public goods and the construction of agricultural socialized service system, taking the family agricultural production mode, which is still the main body and vitality, as the main policy object, is the key to the current agricultural work.