Government should support the development of new agribusiness operators and avoid focusing solely on scaling up farms, says Han Changfu 韩长赋 Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) minister, in response to 'Opinions on policymaking to support new agribusiness operators' issued by State Council on 31 May 2017. According to Guangming Daily, the document calls for new policies on taxation, finance, insurance, infrastructure, and human resources to improve the policy environment for family farms, farmers' cooperatives, and other agribusinesses larger than traditional household-scale farms.
The number of 'new agribusiness operators' is rising: according to MoA statistics cited in the piece, China has 870,000 family farms, 1.888 million registered farmers’ cooperatives, 386,000 industrial agribusinesses and 1.15 million agriculture service providers. Zhang Shaoshan 张晓山 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences fellow and Rural Development Research Institute researcher notes that an estimated 40 percent of China's arable land is now farmed by new agribusiness operators (the remainder is still held by farming households).
According to Han, new policies should
- deliver targeted subsidies and financial support to new agribusiness operators
- prioritise rural collective economic organisations and farmers’ cooperatives for appropriate scale projects with government financial support
- expand access to credit and loans for new agribusiness operators, encourage improved financial service and more innovative products
- support new agribusiness operators to survive and grow despite falling agricultural product prices and rising production costs
- ensure new agribusiness operators are included within existing support policies and regulatory regimes
Kong Xiangzhi 孔祥智 Renmin University professor believes that these new entities should lead efforts to scale up and modernise the rural sector, noting that family farms and other new agribusiness operators are increasingly professional and incomes are rising rapidly. He recommends
- giving new agribusiness operators access to more professional services, such as production trusteeship models
- increasing farmer incomes through advance order contracts, shareholder arrangements and profit-sharing schemes
- encouraging highly specialised 'micro' family farms to join larger farmers’ cooperatives or a ‘company + farmer’ scaled production system so they will be better positioned to withstand risks
- encouraging new agribusiness operators to trial new crop varieties, livestock breeds, technologies, and market approaches