Chapter 41 Chapter 9: Dare to Ask Where the Way Is - 1 The Market Doesn't Believe in Tears

In an "Investigation Report" written to the central government, He Kaiyin pointed out bluntly: "The biggest shortcoming of this tax and fee reform plan is that there is no mechanism for increasing revenue." When implementing the pilot project, Anhui obviously paid attention to increasing support for agriculture, actively promoted the industrialization of agriculture, promoted the adjustment of agricultural economic structure, accelerated the progress of agricultural science and technology, and enhanced the market competitiveness of agriculture.In short, try every means to increase the production and income of farmers and get rich as soon as possible.

They have not forgotten Comrade Xiaoping's words: development is the last word.Of course, this kind of development should be sustainable development. The benefits brought to farmers by adjusting the agricultural structure are immediate.When we first came into contact with this topic, it was the time when the melon farmers in the three counties of Hefei City were "changing their colors when talking about melons".A year ago, all kinds of watermelons in the Hefei market sold for a good price, so those melon farmers who did not study the market rules and have not yet come out of the shackles of traditional agriculture flocked blindly. The melon fields in the Hefei area expanded to 180,000 mu at once, with a total output of 270 million kilograms, while the daily consumption of watermelons in Hefei is only 1.5 million kilograms, and the varieties of these watermelons are basically ordinary Chinese. The variety of ripe melons is average, the output is too large, and the time to market is too concentrated. The watermelons that have been grown after months of hard work cannot be sold for a dime or a catty. There is a strange thing that a big watermelon is worth less than half a bottle of mineral water.The melon farmer shed tears of sadness.

In order to reduce the losses of melon farmers as much as possible, the provincial and municipal news media appealed to citizens to eat more watermelons. The Hefei Municipal Government also made an extraordinary decision to allow small trucks, tractors and various agricultural vehicles for transporting melons to enter the urban area when a large number of watermelons are on the market. The traffic police also implemented a special policy of "no card, no penalty, green light all the way" for melon farmers. For a time, this city was ahead of the rest of the country in its activities to create a civilized city. Zhu Rongji also praised Hefei, where "the environment is particularly good, the air is fresh, and the environment is clean." To all kinds of vehicles pulling watermelons covered with dust, shuttle back and forth "unscrupulously"...

The society calls on the citizens to eat more watermelons, to show mercy to the melon farmers without bargaining, and even to sacrifice the normal order of the provincial capital to provide convenience for the melon farmers. This kind of charity, as well as the spontaneous charity behavior of the citizens, are very touching. This kind of sympathy, of course It should be advocated, and it is only right to help the peasant brothers in difficult times.The problem is, citizens believe in tears, but the market doesn't believe in tears.A product cannot be supported by kindness, and an industry cannot be promoted by morality.Market problems, after all, have to rely on market means to solve.

When many melon farmers were worried about the unsalable watermelons, Sangang Township, a suburb of the city, paid attention to scientific farming. The high-quality watermelons they planted such as "Jingxin No. 1", "Early Spring Hongyu" and "Xiaolan" were sold in the market. As soon as it appeared in the market, it became a hot item, and the price soared, and it was sold for one yuan per catty. Moreover, it entered the house and entered the major supermarkets in the provincial capital. The same watermelon, on the one hand, is in dismal business, but on the other hand, it has become a "sweet pastry" that everyone is scrambling to buy.This formed a very strong contrast in Hefei in July 2001.

Mao Zedong said: If you are poor, you want to change.In fact, it is only those "foresighted ones" who want to change. Sansangang Township is located in the watershed between the Jianghuai River and the Huaihe River, where hills and rivers intersect. It was originally a remote and poor agricultural township on the outskirts of Hefei.With the help of scientific research institutions, they not only cultivated high-quality watermelons, but also registered trademarks for these watermelons.With the continuous expansion of production varieties, the fresh strawberries, fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, as well as special pumpkins and corns they have cultivated successively have registered trademarks approved by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce.

It is still a new thing in Anhui, and even the whole country, that a local agricultural product has risen to a well-known brand protected by law. Nongxing Town at the foot of Zipeng Mountain in Feixi County is a town in the pilot reform of rural taxes and fees in Anhui Province, where the adjustment of the agricultural structure has greatly changed the appearance of the countryside.There, we met Cai Jiade, the mayor of the town, and Liu Dashan, the director of the county agricultural office who came down to guide the work. Mayor Cai said that the name "Nongxing" seems exciting, but for a long time, it was just a dream of farmers here.Two-fifths of the town's area is mountainous, with ninety-four hills, large and small. The conditions for agricultural production are very backward, and basically they are still eating from God.In the twenty-four administrative villages, half of the people, land, and livestock are short of water. Without adjustments to the agricultural structure, it can be said that there will be no day of success.After repeated investigations, the town's leading group finally clarified the development ideas, which are: "Suppress water to expand drought, reduce grain to expand economics, suppress conventional and expand high-quality, press single and expand mixed species; optimize planting, strengthen breeding, adjust Dalin fruit industry, cultivating the processing industry."

Liu Dashan told us with great interest how today's Nongxing people, with their help, "played" with "colorful ideas" that were unimaginable in the past, and held various "wild goods" ": Wild shepherd's purse, wild bracken, wild horse dent, wild amaranth, wild chicory, and also raised wild ducks, wild rabbits, and wild pheasants... In Shangtang Village, Nongxing Town, we visited Yu Chengyan, a professional nursery stock household.Yu Chengyan is a chicken, born in four or five years, and is fifty-seven years old.His family's contracted land is on the hillside, and because most of them don't need water, they used to make a living by growing cotton, growing peanuts and tending yams.A few years ago, under the advocacy of the town, he carefully played with flowers and seedlings. At first, it was just "marriage of a weasel - a small fight".After the reform of taxes and fees, the county party committee and the county government selected several townships including Nongxing, Shangpai, Taohua, Shannan and Shishu to focus on the development of horticultural seedlings. The city also specially invited experts and professors from the Agricultural University to provide free training for everyone. Well, Yu Chengyan was moved, so he simply took out all the contracted land and made a big deal of gardening seedlings.As a result, one-year-old, two-year-old, this authentic farmer who has grown cotton, peanuts and yams for most of his life has now become a well-known "seedling capable person".Pointing to the oily and green forests all over the mountains, he said proudly, "That's 15,000 camphor trees, which are very popular in the market. If you plant one such camphor tree, there will be no flies or mosquitoes; one tree is two trees." It costs more than ten yuan, 15,000 trees, and it will not be a problem to sell for 30,000 to 40,000 yuan. On the other side of the camphor, there are holly trees, and there are no less than 2,000 trees.” Turning around, he pointed to the bright colors under the sun. The site said, "See, it's all red crape myrtle, with 5,000 trees; next to it is Chinese tallow tree, with 3,000 trees. Now I have managed more than ten acres. Others contribute land and labor, and I contribute capital and technology. In the words of the people in the city, my 'cake' is getting bigger and bigger, but in fact, I'm not the biggest in the whole county."

While leading us around, the mobile phone around his waist kept ringing, either to learn from him or to contact business, with a smug look. Today, when food prices are getting low and growing food can no longer make farmers rich, farmers are eager to adjust their planting structure. However, they are constrained by too many factors, and they don't know the outside world, let alone the market. The majority of farmers are still helpless, which requires a group of leaders to drive a group of farmers around to adjust the industrial structure in a timely manner; it is precisely because of the rural areas of Anhui that there are such a group of existing market economies. With "capable people" who have brains and know how to use science to farm, many areas will have a vibrant situation of "Eight Immortals crossing the sea, each showing their magical powers".

If we hadn’t seen it with our own eyes, it would be hard for us to believe the fact that Wu Zhengcang, a major planter in Shenling Village, Qingping Township, Feixi County, had actually set an unprecedented record of 160,000 yuan per mu of ginseng fruit imported from the Plant Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. However, Wu Zhengcang, who got rich suddenly, is still sober.He said: "Such a price is definitely extremely abnormal. With the large-scale introduction of farmers from all over the country, the price is expected to drop rapidly; but even if it falls to four or five yuan per kilogram, one mu of land can earn tens of thousands of yuan at any rate. It is still more cost-effective than farming in the past.”

Just as Wu Zhengcang expected, when farmers in Kanji Village, Xieji Township, Feidong County knew that ginseng fruit was a treasure, they began to introduce it on a large scale. In the second year, the situation of ginseng fruit in the Hefei market was not optimistic. After all, it is a fresh fruit, so it is not suitable to keep it for a long time, so the price has to be "as the market goes", so the lucky ones are paid a high price, selling for 50 yuan per kilogram, but it is worthless after selling, and it is not bad to sell it for 2 yuan per kilogram.Since then, the country has rapidly developed to thirteen provinces and cities. Everyone is scrambling to plant ginseng fruit, and the prices in the market tend to be chaotic. In some places, they even compete with each other and dump them at low prices. The subsequent drop in the price of ginseng fruit was beyond Wu Zhengcang's surprise. The hope that "an acre of land could earn tens of thousands of yuan" did not become a prophecy. But with the rapid promotion of this technology, ginseng fruit has finally become the "sad fruit" of many farmers. The process of agricultural technology promotion has turned into a process of reducing farmers' income. Scientific farming does not necessarily increase farmers' income. It sounds incredible, but the laws of market economy are indeed so profound. full of dialectics. Therefore, people gradually realized that adjusting the structure and appropriately reducing the area of ​​grain does not mean that the grain was caught wrong in the past, and adjusting the structure does not mean only adjusting the proportion of grain (food) and economic (economic crops). Planting more or less does not even mean just adjusting the variety and quality of agricultural products, but changing the past situation of structural convergence and giving full play to the comparative advantages of different regions. In the second year of implementing rural tax and fee reforms in Hefei City, 50 million yuan was cut from the municipal finance as a "special fund for supporting agriculture" to guide farmers in suburban counties to adjust the agricultural structure in a planned way.Hefei City is soberly aware that it is in the position of a provincial distribution center; It has extensive, close and all-round exchanges in trade, logistics and information with other parts of the province, with other provinces and cities, and even with agricultural and sideline product markets at home and abroad.Based on this location advantage, Hefei City has cultivated five major agricultural product bases in suburban counties: Develop 30,000 mu of strawberry, 20,000 mu of edible fungi, 50,000 mu of off-season sweet watermelon, 100,000 mu of cherry tomato, colored pepper, head lettuce, and hybrid edamame; develop 10,000 mu of red water chestnut, 10,000 mu Rush, 20,000 mu of pond lotus root, 20,000 mu of water chestnut aquatic crop base; develop 50,000 mu of black peanut, 50,000 mu of black potato, 50,000 mu of black soybean; develop 50,000 mu of snow jujube, big purple Fruit bases for jujubes, peaches and high-quality grapes, as well as 40,000 mu of flower nursery stock bases. The adjustment of this macro-agricultural structure in Hefei City can be said to be a big deal! Jinzhai County in the Dabie Mountains is a well-known "General County" and a notoriously impoverished county. In the past two years, they have vigorously developed sericulture and chestnuts, and farmers in the old areas have begun to walk out of poverty; farmers in Dangtu County, The use of paddy fields and ponds to breed crabs has expanded year by year and has gradually become popular; the three counties of Guoyang, Mengcheng and Lixin have become the famous "Golden Cattle Triangle" in my country because of their vigorous development of cattle breeding; Tuo's hometown, Bozhou City, painstakingly manages Chinese herbal medicine, and is well-known at home and abroad... There are also people who have become "millionaires" by growing grain.In Houchen Village, Huangwan Township, Fengyang County, we met Chen Xinghan, who was called "Chen Wanwan" by Wang Guangyu, the old secretary of the Provincial Party Committee. "Chen Wanwan" believes that to be a farmer, one has to cultivate the land. If you don't do farming, how can you be a farmer? Now he has contracted 1,200 mu of arable land from nearby farmers on the banks of the Huaihe River in Huangwan. In order to realize agricultural mechanization, he successively purchased rotary cultivators, seeders, combine harvesters, high-powered tractors, and "small Four wheels" and agricultural vehicles.He also built dikes and polders, and built irrigation and drainage stations to ensure the harvest in summer and autumn.In the best year, he harvested 1.2 million catties of rice and 680,000 catties of wheat, and was honored by the Chuzhou Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government as the "No. "Who says growing grain can't make you rich?" Chen Xinghan said proudly pointing to the second floor of his house, "growing grain has not only enriched me, but also the folks in this area. My upstairs has hosted two Guests from 18 countries have come to China; Premier Zhu Jiji has also been a guest!" Undoubtedly, from the body of "Chen Wanwan", who is already a national model worker, we can see that today's party's policy of enriching the people is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and it is also deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. Of course, it goes without saying that although the vast rural areas of Anhui have carried out a pilot reform of taxation and fees, they are still the same as the vast rural areas of China. There are still too many factors for income reduction and too few factors for income increase, so there are few immediate income increase measures. And less.And there are too many "traps". Therefore, if we talk about structural adjustment, what needs to be adjusted is far from the internal structure of agriculture. It should also include urban construction, compulsory education, township enterprises, non-agricultural industries, labor force structure, capital, finance and management methods, etc., especially Yes, it is necessary to fundamentally resolve the long-standing unequal situation of isolation, confrontation, and separation between urban and rural areas.China needs to carry out an institutional revolution, liberate farmers, transfer farmers, reduce farmers, let more Chinese farmers see the hope of entering the city, and finally let them bid farewell to the closed countryside where they have been multiplying for generations, and integrate into the torrent of urbanization go. The road ahead is still very, very long.