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The article states that China's problem is too many little farms, and that farmers can't consolidate because the land is owned by the government. It even goes a
by Noughmad 12y ago
The article states that China's problem is too many little farms, and that farmers can't consolidate because the land is owned by the government. It even goes as far as suggesting that private ownership of the land would help get bigger, more efficient farms instead of a larger number of smaller ones. I understand this is a US site so they're not allowed to say that, but aren't they basically making the case for collective farming (as in communism)?
- thaumasiotes 12y agoSure, if you think of Standard Oil as the apex of socialized fuel production. Communism has nothing to do with the scale things are operated at.
- nichtich 12y agoThe evil of collective farming is the "collective" part, not the large scale part. Optimal scale of operation changes along with the price of labor and other inputs, as well as technology. But collective "ownership" where the incentive system is distorted is never good.
- monkeyninja 12y agoYou have to understand with the big agriculture companies control the prices of seed, fertiliser and food, farmers hardly made any money. Normally government would distribute money to farmers (like in Europe) or farmers make high value product such as cereals and so on. It is like the battle between small shops and supermarket, big guys always win.
- vidarh 12y agoNo, they are making the case for having a large proportion of Chinese farmers leave their plots to allow them to be aggregated into larger farms operated by fewer people. There are two basic problems there: Too many people, and that it is hard for farmers to provide sufficient security to get loans to finance industrialisation because they don't own any land. With the latter, you could get collectives arranging to aggregate their land and e.g. share machinery. Basically, they've socialised the land ownership, but not socialised the farming operation, and as a result they have a mismatch where they've made their farmers a high financing risk. Either socialising parts of the farming operation, or privatising the property would both likely be better than their current alternative for profitability of farms. But the issue of too many people exacerbates the problem: More efficient farms have the potential to be more profitable because you can farm a larger area with fewer people. If the number of people remain constant, you don't have the same incentive, since you are paying for the labor anyway, and probably won't be able to afford it either. So ultimately whatever they do, they will want to encourage a reduction in the number of farmers. The problem is that the government would not like to have to deal with a growing unemployment problem in the cities by driving people to leave their plots, and they also would not enjoy the social unrest it could potentially cause to force the issue. Hence their slow reforms. (It's also very indicative about the ideology of the Chinese government that it has not made any moves towards socialising the farming; e.g. they could have increased the land rent but provided farmers access to collectively owned farm machinery as part of it, or even explicitly required farmers to arrange cooperatives and only rent out bigger parcels of land - instead they are opting for means of making farming rights a commodity subject to market forces)
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoThis is spot on. To note, China did delve into farm operation collectivization under Mao, but this was almost completely undone by Deng.
- ginko 12y agoThis was my impression as well. Owning all the land should make it _easier_ for the government to consolidate all the little farms into larger ones.