Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
To replace the price protection and assist low-income farmers, more
effective measures may be to improve information, technical, and training
servces to farmers to help them to adjust ther producton and to shft
to the more efficient production areas. In particular, more effort can be
made to help farmers to find employment opportunities in non-grain and
non-agrcultural sectors.
Industralsaton and urbansaton
A major structural adjustment that can be expected s the further transfer
of agrcultural labour and other resources to the ndustral and servce
sectors. The transfer of agricultural labour to the rural TVE sector and
the urban sectors during the 1990s was 68 million; but this only reduced
the agricultural labour force from 366 million to 344 million (see Table
5.1). In the process there were only mnor ncreases n labour productvty
and farmers' incomes, far slower than in the 1980s. Employment growth
in TVEs stagnated in the late 1990s and rural-urban migration has also
faced more resstance because urban unemployment has ncreased rapdly.
According to past experience and the current situation, it is assumed that
rural ndustralsaton and urbansaton wll together absorb 5.1 mllon rural
labourers per year on average from 2001 to 2010, and on net reduce the
agrcultural labour force by 4 mllon per year (Table 5.1).
To absorb the grain import shock fully, at least an additional 6 million
farmers should be employed by the TVE and urban sectors between 2002
and 2004 (assuming that 3.2 million will move to non-grain agricultural
production during this period). This is obviously impossible. However, over
a longer period, urbanisation could be accelerated via policy adjustments
(ncludng removng the polcy bas aganst medum and large szed ctes)
and mprovements n urban nfrastructure (Wang and Xa 1999). Assumng
that the speed of rural-urban migration can be doubled, an additional 30
mllon agrcultural workers would move to the urban sector between 2001
and 2010. In this case, the grain shock would be absorbed and there would
be a larger mprovement n agrcultural productvty. Greater absorpton
of the surplus agrcultural labour by the ndustral and servce sectors may
lead to a net reducton of the number of farmers by another 100 mllon
or more over the comng 20 years.
