China
February 21, 2013
Source: Ministry of Agriculture
ECONOMIES OF SCALE: Members of a farming cooperative in Linxi County, Hebei Province, dry chili peppers on December 9, 2012 (YANG SHIYAO)
Rapid development of collective farming creates demand for well-educated modern farmers
Du Mingzhen, 60, has been a farmer all his life in Sijiazhuang Township in Shijiazhuang, capital city of north China's Hebei Province, but was overloaded by cultivating his family's hectare of land during the past few years.
"I used to work in the fields all day long with my wife and both of us were always exhausted. We considered renting machinery during the harvest season, but it was too expensive," Du said. "The dilemma really gave me a headache."
Around one year ago, Du transferred the operating rights of his family's land to a local farming cooperative and also works there as a farmhand. "I still work every day, but now I'm finally earning a salary," Du said, adding that his income has increased and become more stable.
After joining the cooperative, Du has received about 10,000 kg of grain annually in return. He also receives a salary from the cooperative as an irrigation technician. The family's income is also supplemented by the pay Du's wife receives from a job in a nearby city.
Du Yongfeng, chairman of the cooperative, said that many farmers in Sijiazhuang have moved to cities to earn a better living since the salaries are much higher than the income from farming their own land. In 2008 he took advantage of the brawn drain to set up the cooperative, which has incorporated more than 15,000 households and nearly 10,000 hectares of land.
The cooperative hires more than 300 people, who were trained for sowing, irrigation and pest control jobs before being assigned to respective posts. All land is farmed according to the same technical standards on crop management and pest control, and workers are required to wear badges with numbers on them to facilitate responsibility tracing if some work is found below standard.
Du Yongfeng said that the training of these employees for their posts and the model of collective farming have greatly increased the output per unit of area while reducing water and fertilizer consumption by 20 percent.
Across China, the boom in farming cooperatives has significantly changed the agricultural production model in the country. In 2012, China had 680,000 rural cooperatives, a 30 percent year-on-year increase, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. They covered more than 46 million rural households, or 18.6 percent of China's total. In Hebei alone, more than 20,000 farmers work for cooperatives.
Curbing brawn drain
When 30-year-old Liang Yingkui works in the fields, he often stands out as the only young man among many female and elderly farmers.
One year ago, Liang quit his job as a taxi driver in Shijiazhuang and took up farming work instead in his home village near the city where he was born and raised. His parents joined a local farming cooperative and incorporated the family's hectare of farmland.
"Commercial farming represents a development trend in China, which means that farmers will have a better future," said Liang, who never did any farming before his latest career change. He believes young men will replace elderly people and women as the mainstay of the labor force in the countryside in the future.
With the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization in China, many young farmers, especially males, have left the countryside to seek employment or start small businesses in cities. Land has been mainly farmed by the elderly people or women who stay behind in the countryside. A growing number of farmers are deserting agricultural production due to rising production costs, natural and market risks, as well as constraints of the environment and resources involved.
According to a survey conducted by China Agricultural University in 2010 across 10 provinces, the average age of people working in the fields was 57 and they mainly grew grain to satisfy their families' own needs.
Zhang Zhaoxin, a senior research fellow with the Research Center for Rural Economy under the Ministry of Agriculture, said that the aging of the rural labor force has led to two new challenges for China's agricultural development: First, farmers are slow to adopt new crop varieties and new technologies, which limits technology's role in increasing agricultural productivity; second, farmers tend to grow crops that require the least input of labor and money. Zhang estimated that 250 million farmers nationwide moved to cities in the last few decades while there are still 270 million farmers in the countryside.
The Shaanxi Agricultural Technology Training Center recently conducted a survey on 4,500 rural households in 300 villages in the province. It was found that during the last decades around 3.52 million farmers moved from agriculture to other sectors in Shaanxi alone.
According to Kang Wei, deputy director of the training center who was in charge of the survey, women account for 53.1 percent while people above 51 years old account for one third of the province's current rural labor force. "Farmers mostly split their time between working in the fields and doing odds jobs to supplement family income. Sometimes, farmland was even left uncultivated by farmers due to shortage of labor," he said.
"In many places in China, rural families rely on manual labor in cities as their major income source," said Wang Hong, head of the Agricultural Department of the Shaanxi Provincial Government. He estimated that salaries from urban jobs account for up to 70 percent of rural families' income in some places. "If this situation remains, we will have to face the harsh reality that nobody is willing to work in the fields 20 years from now," he warned.
Wang Hong believes to revitalize rural infrastructure and achieve agricultural modernization, professional farmers will play a key role in solving the problems related to China's agriculture, countryside and farmers.
Land of dreams
About 10 years ago, Liu Xueyou, a farmer in Pengdian Township in Xixian County, central China's Henan Province, once had a dream of turning uncultivated land in his village into endless wheat fields. Now Liu has earned the nickname "wheat king."
In 2002 Liu contracted the farming of 3 hectares of uncultivated land from the village. He had increased the contracted land to 30 hectares by 2004 and turned it fertile by having it leveled and building irrigation canals. His farm brought in an annual revenue exceeding 200,000 yuan ($32,152) in the year. After seeing the business potential of large farms, he soon set up a cooperative to further lower the planting costs. More than 100 households have joined Liu's cooperative, which has a farm of more than 1,000 hectares.
Liu Zhi, who was born and raised in Zhonglin Village in Tongwei County, northwest China's Gansu Province, has a similar career trajectory. After completing junior middle school, she took on various odds jobs in cities. In 2005, the diligent woman with strong learning capacity landed a job as a department chief at a major consumer products company in Shanghai. Her monthly salary was between 6,000 yuan ($968) and 7,000 yuan ($1,129), making her the envy of her hometown where the per-capita annual income for farmers was less than 3,000 yuan ($484).
However, Liu Zhi quit her job in Shanghai before marrying a primary school teacher in her hometown in 2007, when she decided to switch to commercial farming. In 2008, a document adopted at the Third Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) gave the green light for farmers to subcontract, lease, exchange, transfer and swap their land-use rights so as to encourage the development of large farms. Liu Zhi and her husband decided to rent land from fellow villagers who worked in cities totaling around 133 hectares. They landscaped terraces, which facilitates the use of large farming machinery and advanced technologies.
The commercial farming trend has also spread to Xiaogang Village in eastern Anhui Province, the birthplace of the household responsibility system, which has greatly boosted China's agricultural productivity by allowing rural households to contract collectively owned land, machinery and other facilities since the late 1970s. A few years ago, more than one third of the village's farmland was transferred to cooperatives, which boosted the proceeds from the land at least five fold.
Wang Huijun, President of the Hebei Provincial Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, said that while the household responsibility system has played a key role in eliminating hunger in general in China, it hinders the development of commercial farming under a market economy.
As early as 10 years ago, Wang predicted that the development of agriculture in China relies on industrializing the sector and turning farming into a profession.
"The emergence of professional farmers pronounces the end of individual household farming with all its disadvantages. Under the new model, farming equipment and machinery will be massively utilized, production costs will be lowered, efficiency will be raised, economies of scale will be realized and agricultural product branding strategies will be viable. These are all development trends for modern agriculture," Wang said.
In official documents, a professional farmer is deemed as a person who tries to maximize his or her profits from commercial agricultural operations. Professor Zhu Qizhen at China Agricultural University, who participated in drafting the plan to train professional farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture, said that professional farmers should have three characteristics: First, they are able to navigate the market and reap big from farming. Second, they take farming as a lifelong career. Third, they have a strong sense of responsibility for the ecosystem and future generations in addition to technological and business know-how.
The Chinese Government already listed "nurturing professional farmers" as a priority in a document issued in early 2012. At the launch ceremony of a professional farmer training program in Bengbu City, Anhui Province, on December 15, 2012, Vice Minister of Agriculture Zhang Taolin said that the government planned to offer training to 100,000 professional farmers through pilot programs in 100 counties, cities or districts across the country over the next three years.
Policy guarantees
"The massive use of advanced farming equipment and machinery in many areas has created the necessary conditions for commercial farming, which will break the bottlenecks of the current agricultural production model and have provided space for developing modern agriculture," said Wei Zhongsheng, an official from the Agricultural Department of the Henan Provincial Government.
According to a document recently issued by the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, China will complete registering and certifying farmers' ownership of contracted land and their land-use rights within five years. According to earlier statistics from the Ministry of Land and Resources, 86 percent of the work had been completed nationwide by the end of October 2012.
The document said that the government will guide the orderly transfers of contractual rights of rural land on the basis of agreed compensations, and encourage land contracts to flow to large-scale users, family farms or farming cooperatives so as to develop scale management.
It also pledged more subsidies to professional investors in the agricultural sector, family farms and farming cooperatives.
Zhu said that smooth transfers of land-use rights and stability of the system are necessary for the growth of professional farmers and large commercial farms.
He said that as farming has only recently become professionalized in China, the public should give them due respect. "They also need comprehensive training programs to broaden their knowledge scope," Zhu said. He also supports qualified urban residents to go to the countryside to become professional farmers so as to change the current one-way labor migration from the countryside to cities.
Zhang Xiaoshan is a senior expert on rural affairs at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and member of the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress. "China should establish a registration system for professional farmers so that they can receive special support and incentives from the government," Zhang suggested.
He said that the average income of professional farmers should be twice to thrice of migrant workers' salaries since they are both laborers and decision-makers and entitled to compensation for their work and returns on investment. He believes that as agriculture is an industry with high natural and market risks, professional farmers should receive sufficient returns to become satisfied entrepreneurs in this new area.
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