Forty years ago, rural families suffered seriously from the scarcity of food. In the late 1970s, desperate farmers in Xiaogang Village of Anhui Province subdivided common farmland into family plots and reaped a very productive harvest. Since reform and opening up began, rural areas have been the frontier and Chinese farmers have shown a pioneering spirit.
Now, the demand for adequate food and clothes, the prerequisites of basic living, has generally been met. But deepening reform and increasing standards of living bring new requirements. How to strengthen rural people's well-being? How to reduce the urban-rural gap?
Chen Xiwen, chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress, shared his insight.
Based on his long-term engagement in agricultural study, Chen has been among China's top decision makers on agriculture for the past 20 years.
According to Chen, farmers, as the pioneers of new practices, were the first to benefit from reform initiatives.
In the initial stage of reform and opening up, the rate of farmers' increasing income far exceeded that of urban dwellers. Today, while farmers generally have enough food and clothes, they cannot enjoy a quality of life as high as urban dwellers and certainly cannot get rich.
To this predicament, Chen offers his advice. He believes the most important way to bridge the urban-rural gap is to continually reduce the number of farmers by providing more opportunities in non-agricultural sectors. That would enable those remaining rural farmers to manage more and more land.
Second, the country must set up a protection system for agriculture, tailored to China's current stage of development, which would guarantee farmer incomes; respond effectively to natural disasters; support building infrastructure; and meet agricultural-training demands. The state should have relevant policies on each front.
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