Transfer payment should pay attention to Farmers' participation

At present, the annual transfer payment to rural areas has reached trillion yuan. Since the abolition of agricultural tax in 2006, in less than a decade, not only taxes and fees have been collected from farmers, but also large-scale transfer payments have been made. The magnitude of the change is incredible.

Before abolishing the agricultural tax, the state collected taxes and fees from hundreds of millions of farmers, because the operation scale of farmers was small and scattered, and the cost of collecting taxes and fees was extremely high. Collecting money from farmers has become the most difficult task in the world. What is quite surprising is that in the case of large-scale transfer payments from the state to rural areas, giving money to farmers has become the first difficult task in the current rural work.

There are generally two forms of transfer payment from the state to rural areas, one is competitive transfer payment, and the other is universal transfer payment. Competitive transfer payment is to apply for infrastructure and other construction projects from the bottom up, and then invested by the state finance, local governments generally need to have supporting; inclusive transfer payment is the financial support available to all qualified farmers or rural areas.

The standard of inclusive transfer payment must be clear

If there is a clear mark or a clear standard for inclusive transfer payment, there will be no dispute over such payment and the payment will be settled. For example, the cooperative medical system, farmers participate in the cooperative medical system, the central and local financial subsidies reach 320 yuan per year, and the new rural old-age insurance, where the rural population over the age of 60 is at least 55 yuan per person per month.

Comprehensive agricultural subsidies are generally required to be subsidized according to the actual sown area, but the actual sown area is not easy to calculate, and the contracted land farmers are often inconsistent with the actual farming farmers, that is to say, if the agricultural comprehensive subsidy is calculated according to the actual sown area, it is difficult to calculate clearly, because it is difficult to count who sowed how much. Therefore, the national comprehensive agricultural subsidies are almost all undifferentiated subsidies according to the contracted area, which are subsidized to contracted farmers, but have little to do with the tillers and the actual sown area.

Another example is the minimum living standard in rural areas. Every year, the national expenditure on minimum living standard is as high as hundreds of billions of yuan. According to the policy, farmers living in poverty should be fully insured. The problem is that it is difficult to have a clear and unified standard for poor farmers, and although farmers have a consensus on really poor farmers in the acquaintance society of the village, when the minimum living standard exceeds the consensus of the whole village, there will be great controversy and many contradictions. For example, the renovation of dilapidated houses in rural areas, because the annual budget is tens of billions of yuan, the transformation of dilapidated houses is often tens of thousands of yuan, whose house is dangerous, and how to evaluate it, the standard is difficult to determine, so almost every renovation of dilapidated houses will cause controversy.

In other words, inclusive transfer payment must be a project with clear standards in order not to be controversial, and almost all projects with vague standards will be controversial. If the standard is vague, grass-roots cadres may take advantage of these ambiguities to seek personal interests, and the strong groups in rural areas may also take advantage of this to seek personal interests. As a result, the state has tried its best to turn the universal transfer operation into a standardized project, such as the comprehensive agricultural subsidy "all-in-one card", which is sent directly to farmers by finance, and it is unlikely to really check who is farming, whether it has been planted or not, and for several seasons.

At the same time, because universal benefits are not entirely based on the average population, but on the basis of specific conditions (such as the minimum living standard), but it is very difficult to standardize who are particularly poor households in the village and which households meet the national minimum living standards, so it is impossible to deal with them across the board. Therefore, either the village cadres are given the power to judge, or the villagers choose the low-income households. Whether the election of village cadres or villagers, there may be personal factors or family factors involved, and it is difficult to achieve objective, fair and fair. As a result, no matter how the minimum living standard is allocated, it will cause conflicts in the village and even lead to petitions.

The Dilemma of competitive transfer payment

Generally speaking, the competitive transfer payment should be applied for by the local government and arranged by the superior according to the actual situation. The acquisition of competitive projects often comes first from the personal abilities and personal relationships of local applicants, while projects that rely on the personal relationships of the applicants make it possible for individuals to gain more benefits from them, although the project is local.

In order to prevent individual corruption in transfer payment, for competitive projects, the state generally requires public bidding, from top to bottom by the higher government to arrange and implement, as far as possible to eliminate local influence. As a result, not only villagers are excluded from the project, but also grass-roots cadres are excluded from the project, but a construction team that comes from bidding to build public works or public welfare undertakings directly related to the immediate interests of farmers on farmers' land. At this time, it is normal to have conflicts between foreign construction teams and local farmers. What's more, there must be nail households in rural areas, there will be "ruthless actors", and there are people who hope to get good treatment through projects, who will get more project compensation by creating problems, while other farmers will stand idly by because they have nothing to do with themselves.

Even if the project arranged by the state can be effectively landed, such landing may be very different from the actual needs of farmers. Rural public goods are characterized by differences, great diversity, and can not be standardized. The more formal bidding from top to bottom, the more difficult it is to flexibly meet the actual local needs. As a result, the tension between flexibility and standardization becomes quite serious.

The most fundamental problem is that the landing of the top-down national project only improves the production and living conditions of farmers, which is charitable, but does not improve the organizational ability and participation ability of farmers through the landing of the project. The project is outside the village.

Transfer payment requires the participation of farmers

Whether it is competitive transfer payment or universal transfer payment, the state distributes money to farmers, which is obviously not smooth, low efficiency and poor effect. The reason for such a situation is that it still has something to do with the excessive dispersion of peasant households. To put it simply, the cost of dealing with more than 200 million different small farmers is very high. Specifically, China's rural areas have huge differences and a large number of farmers. It is basically impossible to find a unified standardized method of subsidies to farmers, and it is impossible to have an one-size-fits-all means of operation. In order to make the national transfer of resources targeted, it is necessary to allow local flexibility in the process of transfer payment. Once there is flexibility and flexibility in the use of transfer payments, localities can take this opportunity to seek self-interest, with a light focus on local political achievements and face-saving projects, and a large number of national transfer payments are used as demonstration sites on both sides of highways; when it is important, they seek private interests, and all kinds of relationship projects and human relations projects come out.

Rural transfer payment is difficult to standardize, so the central government must give local governments room for flexible operation. Once flexible, the use of transfer payment is likely to deviate from the target, or even corruption. This kind of administrative model, which is very familiar to us, is also repeated in the transfer payment from the state to the rural areas.

How to solve this problem?

Different farmers in different regions have different situations and different demands for state transfer payments, which cannot be standardized, making it impossible for the country to adopt a top-down one-size-fits-all policy to solve all problems. The country is unable to deal directly with more than 200 million small farmers, and the only way is to organize farmers at the grass-roots level. Let farmers participate in the expression of the demand preference of national transfer payment. On the one hand, the state transfers resources to rural areas, but this transfer is not only to help the poor and charity, but also to enhance the organizational capacity of farmers and the ability to dock with national resources. On the one hand, farmers can effectively dock national resources only through a certain organizational platform, and really let national resources play the function of providing maximum benefit services for farmers' production and life.

Such a docking platform should obviously be the acquaintance society of the village. It just so happens that the village implements villager autonomy, and the villager autonomy in which farmers carry out self-management, self-education and self-service through democracy has been practiced for more than 20 years and has accumulated mature experience. Now let the village, an autonomous acquaintance social platform, dock national resources, and some of the national resources are transferred to this autonomous platform, which is used by the autonomous platform for decision-making in a democratic way. Such a bottom-up demand preference of farmers and top-down transfer of resources in the village platform through democratic docking, it may not only effectively use national resources, but also enhance farmers' ability of democratic autonomy. The improvement of this ability of autonomy will further improve the ability of farmers to solve their own affairs and solve the basic order of production and life in rural areas.

In other words, there must be the participation of farmers in the process of transferring resources to rural areas.