As millions of China’s able-bodied farmers make their way into the cities in search of a better life, spurred on by low crop prices, they leave behind countless small plots of land tended by the village young and old.
　　This scenario is sounding food security alarms and has attracted much attention from the Central Government. Why With no one tending the crops, who will produce the food to sustain China’s 1.3 billion people?
　　The current system will remain untenable until China’s cities figure out a way to absorb the bulk of Chinese farmers, and the policies governing land contract system are reformed to combine the fragmented tiny plots that dot the countryside, said Wu Jingxue, an expert of Institute of Agricultural Economics and Development, Chinese Academy of Agricultural sciences.
　　Wu said this would allow a smaller number of farmers to make a living using more productive modern farming methods.
　　Farming not an option
　　Tian Zengqiang works at a construction site in Beijing. Born in a village in shanxi Province hundreds of kilometers away, Tian considers himself a worker rather than a farmer - in the past decade, he has worked exclusively in cities.
　　“Eighty percent of men in my village leave for cities to hunt for jobs, and the rest run tiny businesses at home,” Tian told ChinAfrica.“Only women and old people stay working in the field.”
　　Even early in 2006, a nationwide investigation by the Development Research Center of the state Council showed that only one in four villages had laborers younger than 40 years old.
　　Today, the labor drain from villages only becomes more severe. Currently there are 230 million migrant workers throughout the country, and 279 million farmers working in their fields, according to recent statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture. Ministry official Yang Xiongnian said that not only is the number of laborers working on farms plummeting, but also their demographic structures have changed. Most are women and the aged.
　　Every year, Tian goes home once or twice. He misses his wife and children, but said returning to fields is not an option.
　　“It’s impossible to live on farming,” he said. The main reason is the low profit in growing crops.”
　　Tian has 2 mu (0.13 hectares) of farmland at home. “I could have earned only 100 yuan ($16) by growing wheat in my 2 mu of farm- land if I stayed at home for a whole year,” said Tian. “But now, I could earn much more than that while working in urban areas.”
　　Conditions vary, but overall farming is unprofitable across China.
　　Yuan Longping, China’s leading agricultural scientist whose hybrid rice helped China through a food crisis last century, is also anxious about the problem.
　　He explained the problem. According to the statistics released by Hunan Provincial Government, the production cost for growing 1 mu (0.067 hectare) of rice has increased by 121.6 yuan($19.3) in 2011 compared with 2010, decreasing the net return for each mu of rice field in the province to only 116.6 yuan ($18.5), in which 109.1 yuan($17.3) is from the government subsidies. “This means the farmer could earn only 7.5 yuan ($1.2) per mu,” stressed Yuan. A typical rural family’s plot of land is 2 mu (0.13 hectare).
　　On the contrary, Tian can get 150 yuan ($24) per day in Beijing’s construction site. In cities, a woman can also be paid about 60 yuan ($9.5) per day in the service industry. Farming is obviously not a rational choice.
　　“Fewer young people are farming, which will lead to serious consequences,” said Li Changping, a leading agricultural expert in an interview with International Herald Leader newspaper. “It will hurt food security, and also make rural society fall into destitution.”
　　Technology vital
　　China has decided to solve the problem by boosting agricultural output through science and technology. The blueprint is in the No.1 Document jointly issued this year by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the state Council. The theme of this document is scientific and technological innovation.
　　According to Bai Jinming, an official from the Ministry of Agriculture, scientific methods and new technology lay behind 53.5 percent of China’s agricultural growth in 2011.
　　But for farmers, adopting advanced technology can be a burden. From 1990 until 2011, the cost for means of production has increased 20-fold, while the price of rice only increased five-fold.
　　The grain prices in China are lower than other countries. But increasing grain prices is particularly difficult.
　　“The grain price is the base for all prices,” said Yuan. “All prices will rise following a grain price increase, which will cause social in-stability. so the grain price must not be increased.”Yuan also admitted that low grain purchase price hurts farmers’ interests, and reduce their zeal for production. “This harms the food security of the country as well,” he added.
　　Yuan is a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and his proposal for this years’ annual session focused on grain prices. He suggested the government purchase grains from farmers at a higher price and sells them to the market at a lower price. This way, both price stability and farmers’ incomes would be protected.
　　“so long as we increase farmers’ profit, we can attract more people back to farmlands,” said Li, adding that raising grain prices is a good way to solve the problem.
　　In contrast, Wu Jingxue believes that higher grain prices can help some farmers, but not those with tiny plots of land.
　　“Limited arable land resources are the main impediment,” Wu told ChinAfrica. He said that the problem is actually about low productivity rather than a labor force shortage. Due to the government’s rural management system, farmers can only have small plots to farm, and that makes it hard to increase productivity.
　　Grain prices are too low for a grain price increase to help farmers with such small plots. Even if the price surges, the income that farmers like Tian can get on their farmlands can’t compete with their salaries in industry, which has increased five-fold in the past 20 years.
　　China doesn’t have much farmland compared to its huge population. Its per-capita amount of arable land is less than 0.1 hectare, less than half of the world average and one-sixth of that of the United states.
　　Wu believes that if the average amount of farmland for each rural family can rise to over 2 hectares, farmers’ income can rise to a satisfactory level with the help of advanced technology.
　　


　　Surplus of farmers
　　“The rural population is more than enough. The point is, the rural labor force doesn’t match the land resources,” Wu said.
　　Hundreds of millions of farmers are involved in Chinese farmlands while the similar size cultivated area in United states only takes several million farmers. A look at the emptied out villages in rural China suggests a labor shortage, but actually the reason is there are too many farmers, said Wu.
　　“China’s urbanization falls behind industrialization. Industrial output accounts for 90 percent of economic output, but the urbanization rate has only reached 50 percent. The huge gap forces the rural labor force flow into cities,” said Wu.
　　To promote urbanization, Wu insisted China’s social security and medical insurance systems need to ensure farmers don’t have to worry about their future needs. Once farmers have steady incomes in cities, they can move their families there, and contract their fields out to other farmers. For this to occur, the management system for land use right transfers must be changed, as well as restrictions by cities on migrant workers.
　　“This will take time, but needs to happen,” said Wu.