Skip to main content

"Survey Teams" Mobilize Farmers

The Ministry of Agriculture is organizing survey teams of officials who will fan out into villages to drum up enthusiasm among farmers for planting crops, give them guidance, find out about new problems, trends and innovations and report back about farmers' concerns and requests. The survey team campaign is not new (there was a similar campaign last year) but the motivation seems to reflect persistent worries that grain production is not keeping up with demand. Officials want to boost production to head off rises in grain prices. Another motivation seems to be an urgency to head off rural unrest by disseminating propaganda about government policies and gathering intelligence on what's happening in the countryside.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture's web site, the "hundred township, 10,000-farmer survey team" (百乡万户调查组) campaign will organized 123 officials and technicians into 30 teams that will spend a month visiting farmers in their homes in 27 provinces. A training meeting was held on February 7 where the Minister of Agriculture Han Changfu commanded officials to do a good job and take the task seriously. Officials are commanded to go to see "first line" production at the basic level to learn the actual situation in the fields and mobilize, allocate and deploy resources to ensure that grain production increases steadily.

The Farmers Daily says the spring is the critical period for ensuring the year's grain production. It is necessary to win this "first battle" to restore the confidence of society, reduce inflationary pressure and stabilize grain production.

The Farmers Daily explains that teams are to have four types of members:

  • Publicity personnel. Teams are to inform farmers about government policies and make sure subsidies get to farmers without being skimmed off. The purpose is to make sure policies have their intended effect of motivating farmers. Farmers are to have the desire to plant grain in their hearts.
  • Extension personnel. Spread innovations for increasing grain and cotton yields to farmers. Nurture model farmers and create a class of "local experts" and "field scholars" who have the ability to learn about new techniques and spread them to other farmers.
  • Advisors. The description of this role is vague but seems to include advising farmers on ways of mitigating the effects of frost, drought, and pests and twisting arms to make sure farmers plant early rice crops. Among the tasks are to "mobilize the masses to overcome emotions of blindness and paralysis."
  • "Coordinators" are intelligence gatherers. They are to discover and solve problems with seed, machinery, or labor and adapting measures to actual local conditions. They are to listen to local officials' complaints, problems and suggestions and learn about experience and new initiatives of farmers, new rural trends and emerging problems. They are to report what they find to central communist party authorities. 
According to the Ministry of Agriculture's publicity office, a survey team will spend a month in Ningxia investigating four villages in two counties. They will stay overnight in villages, eat there and visit 400 rural households. They will carry out special investigations of a national-level modern crop production base, the potato industry and dryland farming projects.
Survey team in Ningxia (Source: Ministry of Agriculture Press Office).

On February 11 the team visited villages in Linze County where they learned about implementation of agricultural policies, implementation of rural land contract rights, income and employment of rural people, a model for producing seed by integrating farmers and companies, payments for seed, exchange of land contract rights, and they learned about problems and difficulties. 
Survey team in Ningxia (Source: Ministry of Agriculture Press Office).

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

China's Vanishing Soybean Self-Sufficiency Rhetoric

Chinese propagandists appear to have given up on soybean self-sufficiency now that China has gained the upper hand over the U.S. on the soybean trade war front. The barrage of Chinese articles about finding soymeal substitutes, low protein animal diets, corn-soy intercropping, etc. has quietly faded from Chinese media. China's plan to bolster soybean self-sufficiency actually failed, but Brazil's bottomless soybean supplies nevertheless enabled China to snub U.S. soybean producers during last year's trade war. Xi Jinping now is free to make offers of soybean purchases to President Trump in trade negotiations without appearing to do so from a weak position. Mission accomplished, but not in the way Chinese strategists planned. Back in 2019--at the height of the first U.S.-China trade war--China's "Number 1 Document" announced a "soybean revitalization plan" to increase self-sufficiency in soybeans. Soybeans were pronounced to have strategic significanc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Xi Jinping's Doctoral Thesis

Xi Jinping is the vice president and presumed next president of China but little is known about him. In this post the dimsums blog offers its contribution to the genre of Xi Jinping-ology by conveying Xi's decade-old views on agricultural markets. Ten years ago Xi Jinping wrote a thesis, "Tentative Study of Agricultural Marketization" (中国农村市场化研究) for a Doctor of Law degree at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a top breeding-ground for Chinese officials. The dimsums blogger has spent several hours poring over the 200-plus page tome to see what it reveals about Dr. Xi. The thesis is remarkably close to what China has been doing lately in agricultural policy, suggesting that Xi (or the person who actually wrote the thesis) has a major say in policy or is at least in agreement with what's being done. There is nothing adventurous, controversial (or insightful) in the thesis. It seems to be the work of a wonkish technocrat who is not prone to talk out of turn or wander from...
17 comments
Read more

Divergence in U.S. & Chinese egg prices

High egg prices are a hot topic in the United States. China, in contrast, has a glut of eggs and depressed prices.  The March 14, 2025 USDA Agricultural Marketing Service weekly eggs market overview reported that U.S. egg prices continued declining during the second week of March as the supply situation improved. No significant highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreaks have occurred in March and U.S. egg demand is relatively light. The average U.S. wholesale price for Grade A large white eggs was $4.15 per dozen, down sharply from their February peak.  Until 2021, Chinese and U.S. wholesale egg prices had been roughly equal at about $1-to-$2 per dozen with no trend. U.S. prices fluctuated more than Chinese prices, so the U.S. price was sometimes higher, sometimes lower than the Chinese price after converting them to dollars per dozen.  Chinese prices converted using monthly exchange rate and assuming 0.6 kg per dozen. Sources: USDA and China Ministry of Agricult...
2 comments
Read more