“From a bedrock of traditional culture, and an engine of the post-Mao economic boom in the 1980s, agriculture has become a burden for China,” says the New York Times, “and few in the countryside see their future there.” Income in the city is three times higher than rural China. The challenges for reform include the fact that farms are small, so it is hard to boost income from them; consolidating land into larger, and presumably more profitable, operations would displace a sizable number of families; and the government owns the land, so there is no way for farmers to sell their holdings and generate cash for a transition to other occupations.
The government has launched an experiment in the Yangling region of central China, southwest of Beijing, that “stops short of privatization but gives farmers land-use rights that they can transfer to others in exchange for a rental fee,” said the Times. A banker says he will loan money only to fruit and vegetable growers under the system, called liuzhuan, because grain farmers don’t earn enough money to be a good risk. Rental rates are high. “The more grain you plant…the poorer you become,” said one farmer to the Times. A successful operator said he also runs a landscaping business – there are other ways to make money than traditional crops, he said.