Hard landing

JIANGZHUANG: Always an early bird, Ma Yichang, 49, was among the first to have his harvested wheat put into storage. He is a typical Chinese farmer in this Shandong province village.

In the face of the recent historic document unveiled by China's highest leadership to push forward rural development, the dark-skinned chief of the Jiangzhuang Cooperative in East China's Shandong province has plenty of legitimate worries.

"The farmers' land isn't worth much to begin with. It (our land) is like a group of small animals; a few tigers would eat us all," Ma tells China Business Weekly. "I'm as much worried as I'm delighted (by the policy). I'm just afraid it will take a wrong path.

"The starting point of all should be serving socially vulnerable groups, not making the rich richer," he says.

Misused land was the very cause of a decade-long struggle between corrupt village chiefs and local farmers led by Ma, who not only felt it was simply wrong to turn collective land into private hands at anyone's will, but also thought legal measures must be taken.

The subsequent years saw Ma and his village's name repeatedly featured in the provincial media, as one petition after the next eventually led to the local public's impeachment of the village Party chief in 2004.

With help from the Hebei-based James Yen Rural Construction Institute and Wen Tiejun, dean of Renmin University's School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, the Jiangzhuang Cooperative was set up on June 30, 2004.

With passion of collaboration at a high tide, 100 households joined the co-op. The cost for fertilizers went down significantly, while the selling price for rice rose by sharp percentages for co-op members. Success, it seemed, was within an arm's grasp.

But their luck soon faded, smashing villagers back to the real world. To start off, the co-op was technically illegal. The national law on professional rural cooperatives was not promulgated until 2007. In 2004, Jiangzhuang villagers were only permitted to establish a "professional association".

The villagers agreed that livestock and poultry breeding, which seemed economically promising then, would kick-start their co-op effort and the Jiangzhuang Breeding Association was the co-op's official name until this March.

The service-based co-op had members raise and sell pigs, rabbits and ducks. Training seminars were held on a weekly basis. As a collective, the peasants had much more bargaining power with business partners and village committees. But soon, that advantage became a problem.

With little starting capital and no policy support, the villagers found themselves vulnerable to risks of both administrative disruption and market declines.

The co-op relied on the market. But the market crashed. In 2006, pig feed costs soared up to 3 yuan per half kg, while pork prices dropped to 2.5 yuan per half kg. The cooperative had gathered 2,000 yuan from each pig breeder. Most of the money was lost, and so was confidence.

The Jiangzhuang Cooperative, like quite a few others among China's nearly 60,000 professional rural cooperatives, is now jammed in a bottleneck. The richer villagers don't want in, and the poorer ones expect immediate returns. The average age of co-op members is above 40 years old, and their offspring, the young, vibrant migrant workers, don't have an incentive to return to the villages.

That's why despite deep worries, most co-op members applaud the new land reform policy as "thoughtful", as it addresses the issue of land after they, "the last generation of farmers who attach themselves so much to land", die out.

And cooperatives, they believe, are a good solution to the issue. According to Ma: "Without it, and with policy approval, many farmers would be inclined to sell their land to pay off debts. That will create brand-new landlords and laborers."

At the same time, Ma is unconvinced that stringent controls over farmers' land would work, either. Instead, he asserts that the government should take whatever measures necessary to reduce the number of peasants, and permit joint development of rural farmland.

"It's a lot easier to manage things that way," Ma explains. "Each peasant only has so much land. It's as much a pity to sell the land as it is a waste leaving it undeveloped or underdeveloped."

"So if we study together and decide to grow a particular crop on a joint land, we can make it into a brand. Each local resident would become a shareholder of the joint undertaking, and those working in the cities could rent their share," he says. "And we can buy harvesting machines to improve efficiency."

"Selling the land is not an option, at least not for our generation," he says. Ma's 22-year-old son, who works in Shanghai and returns home once a year, may have other views. That's partly why Ma sent his 21-year-old daughter to work with the Yan Yangchu Institute in Hebei.

"I know it's hard, but we can overcome all the difficulties. I've been to Nanjie for a prolonged personal investigation, and the place fascinated me. I figure if they can do well, so can we," he says.

As one of the largest bases for the production of instant noodles and rice chips in the country, Nanjie in central Henan province is arguably China's best-known collective village. Around 7,000 to 10,000 villages like Nanjie, according to scholar Dale Wen, "have continued with the co-op commune model by resisting the top-down pressures to break up".

(China Daily 11/10/2008 page3)