Supply-side structural reform helps increase Chinese farmers' income

Farmers harvest corn in Pingyi County of Linyi, east China's Shandong Province, Sept. 28, 2017. China's Ministry of Agriculture estimated that the country's grain output will surpass 600 million tonnes in 2017, indicating another year of bumper harvest. [Photo: Xinhua/Wu Jiquan]

Delegates to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) say that the supply-side structural reform in agriculture, featuring increased product quality, mechanization and scale, has helped Chinese farmers increase their income. 

CRI's Yu Yang has the story.

Hailing from Anyi County of Jiangxi Province, Ling Jihe is a farmer and secretary of the CPC branch in a local farmers cooperative. He says rice prices have increased and quality of the crop has improved. 

"Our country is increasing investment and taking more measures to develop agriculture. We have been following the supply-side structural reform put forward by General Secretary Xi Jinping. In the past our rice was sold at around four yuan per kilogram. Now the price has reached 36 yuan per kilogram because we have better rice species. In the past we had to import high-quality rice from abroad, but now our Chinese rice is more delicious, more appetizing and more nutritious. I think this can help increase farmers' income," said Ling.

Meanwhile, mechanization helped cut down production costs while increasing the farmers' income. 

Tang Huajun, president of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, says some farmers have increased income by working larger plots of land. 

"An important factor for increasing farmers' income is moderate-scale farming. There are various scales of farming across the country. For example, there are some farmers who farm the land they rent, or the transferred rural land, and there are also others who join the professional cooperatives. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, moderate scale farming takes up nearly 40 percent of the total farming operations in China this year. In this sense, with the increasing scale, farmers can enjoy greater income to some degree. Farming can make money," said Tang.  

Scientists also expect the transformation of research achievements in agriculture to speed up.

Wei Lingling, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, hopes that there will be more policies to encourage scientific researchers to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in the future. 

"The report to the 19th CPC National Congress puts up the concept of the innovation-driven development and says that the integration of the primary, secondary, and tertiary industries should be enhanced deeply with the enterprises as the main body and the market as the orientation. I hope that the transformation of scientific research achievements should be sped up so as to encourage scientific researchers in their innovation and entrepreneurship in the future," said Wei.

Meantime, guidelines released Saturday set goals for resource conservation and environmental protection in agriculture.

According to the guidelines, by 2020, farmland quality should be improved by half a point, based on a scale of 1 to 10. Also, total arable land should reach 124 million square hectares.

China plans to have a modern system in the grain industry by 2020, and raise the ratio of high-quality grain by around 10 percentage points.

The country is also eyeing an annual average expansion of around 7 percent in the added value of the industry, with the increase of the grain processing rate to 88 percent.

The State Council has stressed that more fiscal, tax and financing support should be extended to the sector, and favorable policies in land and power use should also be put in place. 

China's Ministry of Agriculture has estimated that the country's grain output will surpass 600 million tonnes in 2017, indicating another year of bumper harvest.