Activating farmers' own capital is the right way.

The right way to capitalize agriculture is to activate farmers' own capital instead of urban capital to go to the countryside.

In the era of agricultural capitalization, whose capital is going to the countryside? Who gets the benefits of capital? Only by activating farmers' own capital and allowing farmers to profit from agricultural capitalization can farmers' income be increased and agricultural development finally made.

With the gradual development of China's agricultural factor market, especially recently, the market price of agricultural land has been highlighted in the accelerated circulation, capital has entered the agricultural field in an all-round way, and Chinese agriculture has inevitably entered the era of capitalization. Capital has begun to play a leading role in almost every chain of agricultural production. But we have to ask, whose capital is it? Who gets the capital gains? We can see that it is urban capital that enters agriculture on a large scale today. They enter the countryside in the name of industrial capital and financial capital, and begin to obtain the profits of the whole agricultural industry chain in the name of agricultural industrialization and meeting the needs of rural finance.

Urban capital goes to the countryside only to make profits.

Policy makers hope that the entry of urban capital into agriculture can invigorate rural land, manpower and other resources and help the modernization of agriculture, while the latter hope that agriculture will become their new gold digging ground.

There is no authoritative national survey data on the distribution of capital investment in agriculture, but from the analysis of the data of some provinces and cities, the capital directly involved in agricultural production is already a relatively large volume.

According to a report by Li Shaofei, an agricultural magazine, Zhejiang Province, where agriculture is relatively developed, industrial and commercial capital has invested more than 20 billion yuan in modern agriculture since 2010, of which 10.964 billion yuan has been invested in grain functional areas and modern agricultural parks. Of the 9 billion yuan invested by industrial and commercial capital in 2011, the proportion of farming industry reached 47.33%, agricultural products circulation and processing accounted for 33.67%, tourism and leisure agriculture accounted for 18.9%. In 2012, industrial and commercial capital in Chengdu, an integrated urban and rural pilot area, entered 61 projects in the agricultural sector, with a total investment of 17.27 billion yuan. Among them, 21 projects are engaged in large-scale planting and breeding industry, with an investment quota of 3.412 billion yuan.

Although the relevant documents of the Central Committee specifically pointed out that urban industrial and commercial capital should be encouraged and guided to develop farming and breeding industries suitable for enterprise management in rural areas, due to the lack of clear provisions on what is "suitable for enterprise management" in concrete implementation, it is difficult to form effective norms and restrictions on capital in practice.

Moreover, in the nature of pursuing economic interests, at present, capital investment in agriculture is more inclined to higher-value cash crops such as vegetables, fruits and flowers, resulting in the strengthening of the non-grain trend of agricultural production. For example, Chongqing, which is in the forefront of urban and rural comprehensive reform, has successively established ten demonstration projects of urban resources to the countryside since 2007, but none of them involves grain production.

The most profitable areas of agriculture are processing, purchase and marketing, circulation and other links after production. At present, the profits of these links are basically occupied by capital, and the proportion of farmers' profits is very low, which is not conducive to their long-term development. If farmers can not make money from agriculture, it is inevitable to leave agriculture, and when there is a lack of strong and high-quality labor force in agriculture, it is impossible for capital investment in agriculture to make a sustainable profit.

It is difficult for capital to go to the countryside to solve the problem of increasing agricultural production and increasing farmers' income.

At present, agricultural commercialization and agricultural industrialization are mainly manifested in the expansion of agricultural products trading market and the emergence of leading enterprises. The organizational form of agricultural marketization is incomplete, or it marginalizes farmers. In fact, it is a kind of agricultural capitalization dominated by capital forces other than farmers.

This reality leads to great difficulties for decentralized peasant household economy to realize its own interests: first, commercialization led by external capital, so that farmers will inevitably face huge exogenous transaction costs when docking with the market; second, in the face of leading enterprises, farmers are in a weak position in negotiation and are unable to win their own reasonable profits by striving for reasonable prices. This trend will continue to weaken the ability of decentralized small farmers to benefit from the whole agricultural industry chain, resulting in the latter's increasing dependence on capital.

To sort out the main forms of cooperation between capital and farmers in China at present, there are mainly the following forms: first, through direct land expropriation by the government, farmers become citizens or agricultural workers, and capital occupies land for economic operation; second, household-enterprise cooperation, farmers buy shares with land, enterprises buy shares with technology, factories and other shares, and carry out guaranteed dividends. Third, the industrial park model, enterprises transfer farmers' land, pay transfer fees, farmers work in the park, income comes from land rent and labor income; fourth, social enterprise cooperation model, farmers set up cooperatives, cooperatives and enterprises. Looking at the above ways of cooperation, farmers, especially small farmers, are in a passive position, and it is difficult to help them join the lucrative areas such as processing and sales outside the production link, so as to obtain sufficient economic returns.

Because of the huge gap in information, operation and technology, in fact, in most areas, scattered small farmers do not have the ability to negotiate fairly with large capital.

Activating farmers' own capital is the right way.

The entry of large-scale urban capital into the field of agriculture, from individual cases and short-term observation, may be conducive to increasing farmers' income, but in the long run and overall consideration, it weakens farmers' ability to obtain benefits from the whole industry chain. as a result, farmers' subsequent self-development motivation and ability are insufficient, which is not conducive to the solution of deep-seated problems in agriculture.

New ideas are needed to fundamentally solve the difficult problems of agricultural development and promote the increase of farmers' income. The core goal of solving the current "contradiction between small-scale production and large market" is to ensure that farmers obtain social average profits based on the cultivation and sale of agricultural products in the market environment, and that they can continue to produce, process and sell agricultural products, so as to ensure that farmers' income increases and the social demand for agricultural products is met. To achieve this goal, the core of the next step of reform is how to better promote the organization of the peasant household economy.

The realistic strategy is to activate farmers' own capital, establish and improve the comprehensive agricultural service system, and lay a solid foundation for farmers to lead the whole industry chain of agricultural production.

The main reason for the lack of capital in rural areas is that a large number of funds, resources and assets in rural areas are not fully provided to farmers, agriculture, and even outflows. In most rural areas, farmers alone have a lot of savings, but there is no reasonable financial system to serve agriculture, rural areas and farmers. Now that we are guiding or even encouraging capital to go to the countryside on a large scale, we have failed to find out the root cause. "

The urgent task is to establish and improve the rural cooperative financial system, let the rural self-owned capital give full play to its due strength, and at the same time, improve the comprehensive agricultural service system to provide all-round services and support for farmers in production, processing, marketing and other links.

This requires the government to focus its policies on strengthening public services such as agricultural infrastructure construction and agricultural personnel training, while capital can give full play to its advantages in the fields of agricultural science and technology research and development and popularization. in order to achieve the goal stated in the Central document No. 1: to build a new type of agricultural socialized service system with the combination of public welfare services and business services and the coordination of special services and comprehensive services.