Education and research will go long way in helping farmers
Premier Zhu Rongji believes agriculture will remain his biggest concern after the mainland's entry into the World Trade Organisation.
He said foreign agricultural products were likely to flood in after China joins the WTO this month, causing a fall in farmers' incomes.
'Agriculture in foreign countries is more advanced and labour costs are much lower,' he said in Brunei yesterday, on the sidelines of a summit meeting of leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
'This remains my biggest concern.'
Following WTO entry, the mainland has promised to cut tariffs on agricultural commodities from 31 per cent to an average of 17 per cent within five years. The country will also lift its bans on imports of foreign wheat and meat.
Experts say China's 800 million people living in the countryside are ill-prepared to embrace these changes and huge numbers risk losing their livelihood.
According to a leading international agriculture economist, increased government investment in rural education and agriculture research is a must for China after it enters the WTO.
Per Pinstrup Andersen, director general of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and 2001 winner of the World Food Prize, said yesterday in Beijing that it is of critical importance that China invest into rural education and agriculture research so that the rural citizens could benefit from WTO membership.
At the International Conference on Rural Investment, Growth, and Poverty Reduction in Beijing, he said China's WTO entry would have enormous ramifications for its rural sector.
WTO is expected to benefit Chinese farmers who can produce high value-added crops such as fruit and vegetables. China, with its surplus labour, is internationally competitive on those global markets.
However, Chinese farmers, who grow low-value crops such as grain, wheat and corn, will be forced out of business by low cost imports. These farmers then must find non-agricultural jobs.
'The problem about WTO is that it risks pushing the less favourable areas further behind,' Mr Andersen said.
Citing a recent study, Mr Andersen said that spending on agriculture research and rural education was the best way to protect China's rural economies.
Although China's public spending on agriculture research and rural education has been increasing, the IFPRI found their percentages with regards to total public rural spending dropping.
The IFPRI report said that in 1997, China's agriculture research spending accounted for less than 2 per cent of total rural spending which stood at 91 billion yuan (about HK$87 billion), while the percentage spent on education had dropped by 15 per cent since 1990 to 44 per cent.
Mr Andersen argued that increased spending in these two sectors after WTO is most critical because it will not only allow Chinese farmers to increase productivity but also train those farmers who must leave the sector and find non-farming jobs.
'Farming will be more knowledge based in the future. After WTO, Chinese farmers will compete against other country's farmers who are highly educated,' he said.
Mr Andersen believes it is critical for China to provide both primary education and skills training for those who are forced to leave China's farming sector.
'The question is whether these people who migrate be illiterate and unable to get decent jobs or will they have the basic skills to get an urban job,' Mr Andersen said.
'If you don't do that, you are transferring rural poverty into urban poverty.'
