Countryside roads take us home to economic safety

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By Yu Yunhui (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-08-10 17:05

Solving the unemployment problem is the biggest challenge facing the country on its road to social and economic development.

As a country of 1.3 billion people, including more than 700 million farmers, China cannot copy the Western model of development blindly. The basic solution to the problem of providing work for farmers and college students lies in agriculture and the countryside.

The government has to promote all-round development of rural areas so that all farmers and college students can get work. For that to happen, it needs to work on four fronts simultaneously.

First, it should develop cooperative organizations in the countryside to reunite the farmers. The contract system is a negation of communes, production teams and other cooperative organizations of farmers. It led to a “de-organization” campaign in rural areas that resulted in disorderly production and sales, as well as environmental and sanitation crises.

Modern farming involves specialization, cooperation, socialization and an orderly system. The disadvantages of earlier rural production and management organizations have to be removed. But we should not negate the qualities of all the earlier agricultural production organizations.

The Sanlu baby milk-food scandal and the severe drought that hit large parts of North China this spring indicate that the crux of the problem of “agriculture, rural areas and farmers” lies in the lack of proper farmers’ organizations and the disorder in agricultural production.

To have an orderly system for farmers in place, we should first change the existing agricultural subsidy model -- in which governments directly subsidize farming households -- to one in which governments would mainly subsidize farmers’ cooperatives.

Along with this, new types of farmers’ cooperatives can form the organizational basis of a new socialist countryside.

The authorities should accord appropriate priority to farmers’ cooperatives for agricultural production, goods supply, purchase of farm products and rural financial services, too. These measures can effectively reunite the farmers in micro-units of agricultural production.

The government can adopt a joint-stock system dominated by State capital to develop comprehensive rural service networks in fields such as finance, technology, logistics and healthcare. This will help reunite farmers at the macro-level.

Second, we have to expedite process of introducing technology in agriculture by improving rural technological service institutions. Members of rural technological service institutions at the grassroots level should be “educated farmers” who have undergone systematic training in agriculture and farm management.

Graduates of agricultural and forestry colleges today are seldom seen on the frontline of agricultural production. To ensure that agricultural and forestry colleges have to cultivate frontline professionals by enrolling young people, engaged in farming for several years after graduating from high school.

It is true that modern farming methods increase agricultural output and labor productivity. But it is also true that they damage the environment. This harms the health of rural as well as urban residents, and goes against the grain of sustainable development. That’s why modernizing farming will not work until farmers are educated into modernizing their approach, too.

Third, the authorities should set up a corresponding system of product and pricing differentiation. The country cannot protect its high-quality agricultural products from outside impact for lack of a standard system of farm product differentiation.

The failure of domestic soybean and soybean oil industry is a good example of defenselessness. For long, natural but excellent domestic soybean oil competed with the foreign transgenic variant without any transgenic marking. But foreign soybean oil firms not only rode roughshod over the domestic products and caused great harm to farmers who grew soybeans, but also deceived Chinese consumers.

To ensure such a thing doesn’t happen again, we must have in place systems, standards, pricing models and logistics channels according to product and pricing differentiation. This would not only protect the interests of farmers, but also make people more aware of the importance of environmental protection.

Fourth, the government should promote construction projects to provide housing in rural areas.

After the collapse of rural productive organizations, farmers have become individual producers. Public health, public culture and environmental protection in rural areas are no longer organizational affairs. The public education system has suffered, too. The lack of government control and management has made it easy for people to channel huge quantities of counterfeit goods that they can’t sell in cities to rural areas. All this has made vast areas of the countryside unfit to live in.

Economic development is meant to improve the livelihood of the entire population. Making rural areas a healthy place to live in should be the immediate task of the government. It is essential, too, for the development of rural economy.

Given the existing unsustainable economic growth model and the restrictions imposed on resources, market and the environment, it’s high time the government changed it outlook on development.

And for that it has look toward the vast countryside, and set about building an orderly system for farmers, introducing as much technology as possible in agriculture, establishing networks for agricultural product differentiation and rural services and making rural areas livable.

The author is visiting professor of Xiamen University.