Shenyang, China — The Chinese Communist Party, for the first time since the founding of the socialist state in 1949, is planning to allow the cultivation, transfer, and sale of land to farmers.
According to Xinhua News Agency on the 12th, a communiqué titled “The Decision of the CPC Central Committee for the Pursuit of Rural Reform and Development” at the Third Plenary Session of the 17th CPC Central Committee was deliberated on and passed.
According to the communiqué, if the cultivation, transfer, and sale of land are permitted, farmers will commercialize the land contracts and will use them to gain new profit. Also, it is expected that the speed of rural mechanization will quicken, with the contribution of medium and large-scale business farming, introduced through the acquisition of land, which until now had been dispersed at the individual household level.
The recent decision expresses the intent of the Chinese government to raise consumption by realizing a reasonable living standard across the board through the development of the rural economy. This should also help mitigate the urban-rural gap so characteristic of Chinese society.
However, Chinese reform policy is simply another opportunity for farmers to sustain themselves and is unaccompanied by a significant policy measure. The decision expands the noninterventionist policy towards farmers. As such the measure can be viewed as another step towards China’s farms becoming completely independent of collective ownership and the state guidance system.
Regrettably, North Korea insists on a traditional collective management system in agricultural areas. Consequently, food crises and deaths from starvation have been recurring every year.
According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), North Korea, after the 1990s, ranked second out of ten countries where the hunger index had significantly worsened. The remaining nine countries are African states that have experienced civil war or strife.
To make matters worse, grain produced on the collective farms has mostly been diverted as aid to the People’s Army. The same goes for aid from international society. Last year, the amount of grain distributed to North Korean farmers was less than 200kg per household. According to the distribution system in North Korea, 800kg of grain must be annually provided to a household of four people, but current provisions have been at a meager 25% of this amount.
Meanwhile, North Korean farmers are surviving off of “kitchen gardens” or small “scrap fields” on the slopes or ridges of collective farms where individual cultivation is permitted. The yields from such fields are on average between 100~150kg per year. This figure is on par with the distributions to farmers of collective farms. Domestic citizens say that corn harvest from private fields is two or three times greater than from collective farms.
China’s mistake up until the mid-1970s was to be so extremely leftist, the way the North Korean system still is today. Under the collective rule system, including the people’s commune, production solidarity, and production unit, and under the pretext of the fight against capitalism and feudalism, farmers were not allowed to eat at home and could only eat at the cafeterias on the farm.
What were the results after the rural reforms? The rate of increase of grain production per person prior to reform was only 0.2% for 20 years between 1957 and 1977. In contrast, following the reform, the annual average increased by 3.8% between 1978 and 1984.
The path that North Korean must take to help its people is clear. It is not the dangerous gamble of threatening international society with nuclear weapons or developing a radical farming method. As our ancestors have done, North Korea should adopt the ordinary wisdom of allowing farmers to cultivate their own lands.
