Risk factors of current Rural Land transfer

China's rural land management from intensive to decentralized has been a great historical progress, including output-to-household contract responsibility system has activated the huge rural productive forces. With the overall progress and development of society, the decentralized land has some problems such as low efficiency of resource allocation, and the appropriate scale operation of land has become the only way to develop modern agriculture. In this context, it has become a general trend for land to change from decentralized to intensive.

By the end of 2014, the transfer area of contracted cultivated land in the country was 403 million mu, 6.3 times that at the end of 2007, and the proportion of the transfer reached 30.4 percent, an increase of 25.2 percentage points over the end of 2007. Accordingly, under the premise that the national basic land policy remains unchanged, the transfer of diversity has become an effective way to re-intensive and disperse land. As a matter of fact, the behavior of rural land transfer has never stopped since the contracted production reached the household. From a small amount of spontaneity among farmers to a large area under the orderly guidance of national laws, more than 30 years of experience has been accumulated one after another. However, rural land circulation is a systematic project, which involves all aspects of "agriculture, rural areas and farmers", the vital interests of farmers and the stability of the whole society. It is a factor that should be considered in the work of land transfer. According to the current practice of land transfer across the country, most of the land transfer has achieved good results, but some risk factors still need to be vigilant and improperly handled, and may become systematic problems.

Using custom and practice instead of law, the behavior of circulation is not standardized.

The land system is the basic economic system of the country, not only the state has strict regulations on land, especially rural arable land, but also local governments, villages and groups where the land is located have complex and meticulous management requirements. For example, "if the transfer is by subcontract, lease, exchange or other means, the contractor shall promptly put on record with the issuer; if the transfer is by way of transfer, it shall submit an application for transfer to the issuer in advance." In practice, the forms of land transfer are also diversified. according to the summary of the scholar Cai Zhirong, there are at least 12 forms that can realize land transfer: subcontract, transfer, lease, swap, shareholding, ploughing, auction, mortgage, land trust, anti-lease, inheritance and gift. Diversified forms of land transfer are bound to show diversified characteristics of rights and obligations. In addition, as an important means of production for farmers, the circulation of agricultural land, as an important right of disposition, is related to the major interests of the whole family, so there should be sufficient evidence to prove the interests. Therefore, for both the transferor and the transferee of the land, in addition to the legal factual reasons of inheritance, the important rights and obligations of both sides of the land transfer are clearly agreed in writing, which is not only a mandatory requirement of the law, but also the actual need to reduce disputes. However, in practice, it is found that a large number of land transfer acts are carried out only on the basis of private oral agreements between farmers. Scholars found that Liandu District, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province, "the signing of land transfer contracts and written agreements accounted for only 49% of the total area, most of which are limited to oral agreements between the two sides of the transfer", which is representative to a certain extent. As for the situation that the contract has not been filed by the contracting party or the content of the written agreement is incomplete, it is also quite common, and some even the content agreement is illegal and invalid, a more common example is the agreed land lease contract for a period of more than 20 years. In order to replace the legal standard transfer contract with the conventional oral agreement, as the main way of land transfer, it leaves hidden trouble for the performance of the contract, which can easily lead to disputes. When this kind of behavior becomes a common phenomenon, it will hinder the development and improvement of the land transfer market as a whole, and will also become the fuse of rural social contradictions.

The government exercises power on behalf of farmers and despises farmers' individual property rights.

The direct stakeholders of contracted land are farmers, and circulation is only a way for farmers to exercise their property rights, which belongs to the private law field of autonomy of will, whether it is the village committee or the grass-roots government. there is no legal reason to force farmers to transfer land passively or in a disguised form. However, some local governments or grass-roots organizations directly intervene in the intensive process of land in the name of attracting investment, increasing farmers' income and developing large-scale agriculture, disregarding the actual requirements of farmers, forcing farmers to transfer land passively in disguise. This not only infringes on the property autonomy of farmers as a whole, but also ignores the individual interests of farmers who are heavily dependent on land in the process of land intensification. This kind of rude and unauthorized approach not only can not better protect the land rights and interests of farmers, but is very likely to lead to social conflicts at the grass-roots level. Once farmers' rights and interests fail, the blame will also be placed on the government, increasing the responsibility of the government. As early as the end of 2014, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the "opinions on guiding the orderly transfer of Rural Land Management Rights to develop appropriate scale Management of Agriculture", which pointed out that land circulation should "adhere to the law, voluntary, and paid". Take farmers as the main body, "must not go against the wishes of contracted farmers and shall not harm the rights and interests of farmers", which can be regarded as a warning to this kind of problems.

The concentration of the transferee of land transfer is too high, and the ability of risk diversion is poor.

One of the main purposes of land transfer is to achieve intensive management of land, and intensification itself is also one of the risk factors. As a way of land transfer, land trust has frequently transferred thousands of mu of land since the issuance of land trust in Hanqiao District, Suzhou, Anhui Province in 2013. As for the land transferred by the trust, the trust company itself does not operate directly, but is often leased to agricultural enterprises to operate, and the land rent becomes the trust income of the land transfer party, thus completing the process of farmers' land capitalization. In practice, the land obtained by the circulation of agricultural enterprises is actually the intensive land of many farmers, even the centralized transfer of the whole village and township land. This means that a large number of farmers' land income is concentrated on one or a small number of agricultural enterprises, and the land rent payment obligations of these agricultural enterprises generally mainly rely on credit and there is no other guarantee. As a massive land transfer project dominated by the government or grass-roots organizations, the leader of the project is not the actual stakeholders. Once there is a lack of professional and detailed assessment of the credit status, solvency and risk diversion measures of agricultural enterprises that directly manage land, or even in order to complete political achievements, consciously blur the defects of land users, it will bring greater debt repayment risk. When the operating obstacles of agricultural enterprises lead to the shortage of cash flow, or other factors lead to problems in enterprise sustainability, the expected interests of many farmers will be in the risk of breach of contract. Once a large amount of land rent is breached, the group dispute of the landless peasants will follow. In view of the relatively high risk of agriculture itself, we should be cautious about the transfer of vast amounts of land. The transfer of land is concentrated on a single agricultural enterprise, regardless of its debt-paying ability, it is tantamount to putting all farmers' eggs in one basket, which is a kind of high-risk behavior in itself.

The blind pursuit of scale and the deviation of government incentive guidance

The rapid promotion of land transfer across the country is mostly carried out under the encouragement and guidance of the government, in which financial subsidy is one of the more common incentive measures. However, there are two phenomena in the current government subsidies: first, mainly to land transferees, especially for super-large-scale enterprises, rarely to land contractors; second, the subsidy policy is mostly in an one-off way. This has led to some adverse policy consequences. First, the scale of the transfer of land is getting larger and larger, and super-large agricultural enterprises are obviously encouraged. However, some studies have shown that agricultural efficiency and productivity can not always be positively correlated with scale, and the benefit of agricultural production on an appropriate scale is optimized. It is not advisable to pursue super-scale blindly. Second, although the one-off subsidy measures have achieved the effect of policy encouragement and played a good role in promoting investment, they have given birth to the short-sighted behavior of agricultural producers. The purpose of the massive inflow of land into some enterprises is to obtain government subsidies and solidify them quickly. The scientific way of subsidy should be based on the actual operating situation of the enterprise, and it is more reasonable to release subsidy funds continuously in the process of enterprise growth. In addition, in some local government subsidies, the grass-roots government will get more subsidies from the higher government at the same time, while the grass-roots government subsidies first, the grass-roots government will benefit from the subsidies, strengthening the motivation to expand the scale of land transfer. These behaviors will undoubtedly aggravate the overall risk of agricultural management.