By Ye Xingqing

Research Report Vol.20 No.3, 2018

What agricultural management system to choose to effectively unleash the potential of agricultural development depends on the roles of farmland management in the employment and income increase of farmers and on effects that the advancement of agricultural technology and social services have on the forms of agricultural management. China now is moving towards the goal of achieving basic modernization by 2035 and of comprehensively building a modern powerful country by 2050. In the process of modernization, profound structural changes will take place to the urban-rural relations, rural economy and society among other things in the country, making it imperative for innovation in agricultural management to follow the law of development and conform to the change of times.

I. Conforming to the Structural Change of Land Functions and Innovating the Agricultural Management System in a Way that helps Exploit the Functions of Land Factors

There has for quite long a time been a deep-rooted view that the Three Rural Issues (agriculture, rural areas, and farmers) are not simply about agricultural efficiency which must be addressed alongside the way out for problem concerning farmers; that land transfer and concentration inevitably creates landless farmers who wander from place to place and endangers social stability; and that to innovate the agricultural management system and improve the land ownership structure must give sufficient consideration to the extreme importance of farmland to the livelihood of farmers, as well as to the function of farmland in terms of ensuring people’s livelihood security and social stability. This view has justifications and nevertheless its limitations also.

So far as its justifications are concerned, land has indeed for decades carried multiple functions, making it improper to consider the issue purely from the angle of efficiency. When a climate in which “every household has contracted land for farming” was first created in 1985, the rural population accounted for 76.3% of the country’s total, the primary industry employed 62.4% of the country’s total population employed, and land provided employment for nearly two-thirds of the whole society and for the absolute majority of rural labor; of the national per capita net income of farmers, 81% came from household-based operations, 62% from primary-industry operations, and 48% from plantation operations, with land generating nearly a half of farmer income. Farmers in those days basically received no social security benefits and had to rely on land for paying for their child education, health care, elderly care, etc. It was proper and justifiable then to regard land as the most reliable source of income for farmers and emphasize its social security function. Though later on sources of employment and income for farmers became increasingly diversified and the rural social security system gradually improved, relevant national policy always stressed the social security and stability functions of land, and that development with respect to land transfer and economies of scale must be “appropriate for the process of urbanization and the scale of rural labor transfer, for the advancement of agricultural technology and the degree to which the means of production have been improved, and for the increased levels of service for the socialization of agriculture”[].

From the perspective of the aforesaid view’s limitations, with land functions becoming divided rapidly and ways out for farmers diversifying, continued neglect of the problem of efficiency is detrimental to boosting agricultural modernization and competitiveness. First, the employment and income increase functions of land have been in decline. In 2016, the primary industry countrywide saw an employment share down to 27.7%, migrant workers across the country numbered 281.71 million, and a very low percentage of the laborers as members of rural collective economic organizations remained in farming. Of the per capita disposable income of farmers for the same year, net income from household, primary-industry and plantation operations dropped to 38.3%, 26.4%, and 19.7%, respectively, with farming income already below one-fifth of farmer income. Second, the social security function which used to be served by land has now been ensured by the government-led rural social security system. Since its pilot launch in 2003, the New Cooperative Medical System has seen growing enrollment rates and fund pooling levels, with per capita subsidies from finance departments at various levels rising to RMB 450 and per capita contributions from farmers reaching RMB 180 in 2017. The new old-age insurance system for rural residents, launched on a pilot basis in 2009, has progressed faster than anticipated, and its objective of covering all rural eligible residents by 2020 was achieved in advance, in 2012; the monthly per capita old-age pension has increased from initially RMB 55 to RMB 70 for the present; the level is much higher still in some regions, like Beijing where the basic old-age pension for urban and rural residents has arrived at RMB 610 a person per month. Beginning in 2007, the subsistence allowance system expanded from cities to rural areas, with an increasing subsistence allowance standard for rural residents countrywide, and as of September of the year, the national rural standard reached RMB 4,211 per capita per year and the system covered 40,782,000 rural residents. Third, land is no longer the only way out for farmers. Before the advent of the age of industrialization and urbanization, land represented the sole way out for farmers, and land mergers would often create vagabonds and consequently lead to social unrest. Into the age of industrialization and urbanization, more and more farmers looked for ways out outside land. In 1978, the country had an urban population of 172.45 million and a rural population of 790.14 million. If there was no movement of population between urban and rural areas, the urban population and the rural population in 2017, estimated by a natural population growth rate of 9.467‰, would have been 249.03 million and 1,141.04 million respectively, which were in fact 813.47 million and 576.61 million - meaning that over the 40 years the country had 564.44 million rural people who migrated to cities[]. The land reform - “no land increase and decrease, regardless of change in family size” - which Meitan County, Guizhou province, has carried out for nearly 30 years, also illustrates that in the age of industrialization and urbanization, an added rural population, even if they have no contracted land, could still earn a living in other trades and even live better still.

The above analysis shows that with the advancing of times, the livelihood security function of land has been in decline and ways out for farmers diversifying. To more and more farmers, continuing to keep contracted land is mainly to have a sense of security. Admittedly, the present government-led rural social security system provides a level of security that has yet to be heightened, land is still to a certain degree seen as a source of income by some farmers, and multitudes of rural migrant people have not assimilated into cities, living in an unstable state. But so far as policy guidance is concerned, it is better to take steps to improve the rural social security system and boost urbanization of farmers, than to continue to put livelihood security for farmers on their small parcels of land (Quan Shiwen and Huang Po, 2018). The fading away of the livelihood security function of land and the rising of its role as a factor of production raise new requirements and provide new room for agricultural management innovation.

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