Looking for farmers of the future

Empty fields

Writing in The Beijing News, He Bing, a professor at China University of Politics and Law, discusses the problem of aging in China’s agricultural sector:

This past summer, I took several students back to my hometown in Anhui to conduct an investigation. From the village cadres I heard that only the old, sick, and disabled are left to farm the land; anyone who has any prospects has left. They said mournfully, “In ten years, who will till the land?”

I remember in primary school a teacher taught us to address people as “uncle worker,” “uncle soldier,” and “uncle farmer.” Thus, in my mind, farmers are my good-natured elders. But today, “uncle farmer” doesn’t farm; the land is farmed by “grandpa farmer” and “grandma farmer.”

I met a number of village cadres, all of whom were in the grandpa/grandma range, most of them over fifty and some even on the other side of sixty. They said that the young people had all left, and the ones who hadn’t left were unwilling to be village officials. “It’s only 1000 yuan a year. Where’s the motivation in that?” And according to them, the village schools were empty: “The good teachers have all gone, and they students left with them.”

Going through the data after I returned, I discovered that aging among the the population of working farmers is a nationwide phenomenon. In the better situations, the average age is above forty; in the worse, it’s above fifty—there are only white-haired people living beside the mountains and streams. In the villages of the past, though they were poor there was always the sound of chickens and dogs, of people laughing and horses snorting: a “lively countryside.” But today, such situations are rare, such sights have long since disappeared. It is only at the Spring Festival that a bit of delight returns. In some towns, no able-bodied men can be found to work the farming machinery. One person sighed: in a few more years, there may not be enough people to hoist a coffin….

Pastoral remembrances of the fields of the countryside are not important; what is serious is that in a decade, the average age of China’s population of working farmers will be over fifty, or even over sixty. As the “grandpa farmers” and “grandma farmers” pass away, the number of working farmers will decrease dramatically. We cannot blindly hope that in a decade, the migrant workers who have come to the cities will return to their fields to take up once again their lives of “face to the ground, back to the sky.” I am farmer’s child—will I return home to till the earth? Will you? The movement of people from the countryside to the city is irreversible; this is a common experience all over the world. The dull, isolated, and harsh life experiences of villages and villagers means that once they enter the cities it is like the Yellow River entering the ocean, never to return. Besides, after living apart from the countryside and the soil for many years, their physical abilities fade: they’ve grown older, and even if they wished to go back they are no longer the people they once were. An older friend of mine who has not been in the city long once exclaimed, of the farm work he used to do, “I can’t do it. I really can’t do it anymore.”

In recent years, the state has increased subsidies for agriculture to alleviate the situation somewhat, but please do not imagine that subsidies can “conquer” the trend toward rural aging and decline. Our country’s historical land policies provided extremely limited land for each household; the land was chopped up and patched together, with no way to gain efficiencies of scale. The small-scale model where “each tends his own” can keep farmers alive but it cannot bring them prosperity; it can solve the problem of survival but it cannot address the issue of development. Though there are a minority of exceptions, the overall judgment that “no one gets rich tilling the soil” is hard to change. In an age when the whole country is getting rich, many farmers place all of their dreams of wealth in the bosom of the city. Because of the fragmentation and patchiness of farmland, mechanization and modernization of agriculture is hard to accomplish. I am not an expert in the “three rural problems,” but there is one truth of which I am convinced: fields must be tilled, whether by hand or by machine. Today’s rural residents are unwilling to farm by hand, and they have no means to farm by machine. Sooner or later this will lead to “grain scarcity” and a “grain scare.” If one day the price of grain, oil, and vegetables doubles, what will things be like?

The aging of rural populations and the decline of agriculture is not a problem unique to China. Japan and Korea have “three rural problems” too: aging populations, decline of the agriculture sector, and insolvency in the countryside. According to figures for 2006 from the Korean National Statistical Office, people over 65 years of age make up 30% of the rural population, an aging rate more than three times that of the national average. Through the end of 2005, the proportion of the national population that lived in the countryside dropped in half from the number fifteen years before. At the root of Korea’s “three rural problems” is its declining rate of production; average arable land per household is 1.36 hectares, there is no way to further mechanize, and the price of agricultural products is 2.85 times the international average. The government’s countermeasures have been to encourage collectivization to facilitate large-scale operations. Developing rural tourism and local industry has increased the non-agricultural income of farmers. The government plans to invest US$119 billion in agricultural revitalization between 2004 and 2013 to rescue the sector from death.

Japanese youth rarely enter agriculture. In 1999, the number of rural Japanese households stood at 3.24 million, a decline of nearly half from the 6 million there were in 1950. Among people working in the agriculture sector, those aged over 65 made up around 50%—aging is quite serious. Compared to the 1950s, land devoted to farming has dropped in half, bringing the grain self-sufficiency rate down from 60% in the ’70s to around 30% today. Japan is heavily reliant on imports from China and the US.

For China, the uniqueness and seriousness of this problem lies in the fact that it has a population of 1.3 billion, with a predicted rise to 1.6 billion. A day without grain is a day without stability. When Japan and Korea are short of grain, they can import from China. When China is short, where can it import from? The global price of grain will inevitably rise. The lives of many of China’s urban residents rely on low-priced grain, oil, and vegetables. If those prices double, the “happiness index” of urban residents will plummet, and all pricing systems will be shaken, creating a political and economic crisis. Compared to the prices of grain, oil, and vegetables in other countries, the price in our country ought to rise, and such a rise is inevitable. I am in Korea right now, and I have discovered that their vegetable prices, including the price of sweet potatoes, are about the same as that of pork!

Rural aging and the decline of agriculture is swiftly approaching us; we must be on high alert. Areas ranging from investigating policy adjustments to implementing new legislation require financial resources and manpower, but also time. Land policy especially – we must make preparations before the rain comes. For example, should policies on rural land trading be relaxed to provide favorable conditions for land transfers and annexation, which would spur the modernization and mechanization of agriculture? After land is combined, what state protection should there be for the landless farmers? Can agricultural management structures be incorporated, letting farmers organize companies with their land to achieve scaled operations? How should social capital be attracted to take a stake in agriculture? When villages empty out, how should villages be combined and redesigned?

Land and agriculture have long been the root of a nation; we must tread carefully. So we must be bold with our answer to this question: in ten years, who will farm the land?

As He Bing notes in his article, the lessons learned from other nations’ experiences handling changing rural populations can be used to shape policy in China. Yeeyan, a collaborative translation website that just published a group translation of Karel Baloun’s Inside Facebook, is working in other areas in addition to cutting-edge social networking technologies. Yeeyan’s Rural China Group is currently in the process of translating the US government report “Federal Rural Development Policy in the Twentieth Century,” in the hopes that it can educate a wider Chinese audience about problems and policies that another large country faced in the modernization of its agriculture sector.