Farming pressure
Who will do the farming? It is an unavoidable question that China's agriculture and its countryside are now facing amid a new round of market-oriented grain price reform.
Since 2004, China's annual grain production has experienced extraordinary growth for 12 consecutive years, pushing the country's grain stocks to the highest level on record, Ren Zhengxiao, head of the State Administration of Grain, told a press conference on Tuesday in Beijing, China National Radio reported.
Vowing to push forward the supply-side reform in the grain market, Ren said that the authorities will make efforts to introduce a market-oriented mechanism of grain procurement.
"Following the principle of letting the market determine prices and delinking subsidies from prices, we will reform in an active yet prudent way the system of corn purchase and storage to ensure reasonable returns for corn-growing farmers," Premier Li Keqiang said in a government work report in March.
Still, the price reform is contributing to drops in domestic grain prices, tingling both individual and large-scale growers, observers said.
Pricing reform
The market-oriented reform aims to change the current policy-based corn pricing mechanism and make domestic corn prices in line with international prices, Li Guoxiang, a research fellow at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), told the Global Times.
According to National Grain and Oil Information Center statistics, the price of domestic corn is 428 yuan ($65) per ton higher than that of imported corn of the same quality.
The price difference between domestic and foreign wheat is 823 yuan per ton, Ren said in April.
The drop in the corn prices has put much pressure on large-scale growers, who normally rent farmland from farmers with land-use rights.
In China, rural land is under collective ownership while urban land is owned by the State.
Farmers belonging to the collective community enjoy certain land-use rights.
Zhao Guohuan, director of a cooperative which rented 1,800 mu (120 hectares) of farmland in Yanjin county of Central China's Henan Province, said that they were considering returning half of the rented land in the next half year, although the contract has not expired, the People's Daily reported Sunday.
"Large-scale growers would probably slow down the pace to scale up as they might be most heavily affected by drops in corn prices," Zhang Yuanhong, an expert on rural economy with the CASS, told the Global Times.
But the trend of large-scale operation in agricultural production will not be altered, Zhang added, noting that the development of agricultural socialized services may by accelerated.
A new model of rural land circulation, through which farmers are allowed to turn their land-use rights into shares in farming enterprises or cooperative societies, is likely to replace the leasing model, Li Guoxiang said.
In March 2015, the Ministry of Agriculture announced a year-long pilot program on such a model of rural land circulation.
Dwindling labor force
Although the Pingling village of Yanjin has 550 households and 4,900 mu of farmland, "there are almost no people under the age of 55 working in the farmland," a village official named Xiao Hongsheng was quoted by the People's Daily as saying.
Although the corn prices have started falling, Zhang Wenming, a 65-year-old farmer of the Pingling village tilled a total of 10 mu farmland. Zhang lived with his wife and their grandson while his son and the daughter-in-law worked in the city, earning some 6,000 yuan a month.
"I don't hope to make money by farming," Zhang said, adding that he farmed only to make a living.
Even in Yanjin, a plain area famous for its high quality wheat, aged farmers like Zhang are worried that the young generation born in the countryside are unwilling to do farming and most do not know how to farm.
"The rural population aging might continue in future," Zhang Yuanhong said, noting that it should not be a cause for concern. If socialized services in China's rural areas could be improved and agricultural mechanization enhanced, there will be less need for labor force.
"Then aged people can also do farming, as they just need to stay and keep an eye on the crops," said Zhang Yuanhong.
He added that services such as sowing and spraying pesticide could be provided by corresponding professional service firms or organizations.
