The breakthrough road of agro-ecological transformation

Author: Zheng Lei

The people's food is the wisdom of life in the ancient agricultural era.

Even if we have entered the era of the digital economy with one foot, agricultural production is still the foundation of industry, and the fluctuations in agricultural production caused by climate change are still reflected in the industrial economic cycle. Before the realization of agricultural production based on soilless cultivation and artificial light technology, how to develop agriculture is still the core issue of human survival and development.

In the context of the transformation of ecological civilization in the 21st century, how can China's agricultural development be transformed from the old model of traditional agriculture in the past with industrialization to a new model of sustainable development? This is exactly the question that agricultural economist Wen Tiejun and his team have worked hard to answer in the practice of agricultural ecology and socialization for 20 years. In his new book "From Agriculture 1.0 to Agriculture 4.0: Ecological Transformation and Agricultural Sustainability", he systematically summarizes the agricultural model at home and abroad, discusses the ecological transformation and sustainable development of agriculture, and opens the pulse of China's agricultural economy through detailed domestic and foreign sustainable agricultural practice cases.

Ecology is the way out for human civilization

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects the earth's average temperature to rise by 0.5 degrees Celsius between 2000 and 2025, a period of unprecedented warming. Whether the climate warms or cools, it can bring natural disasters or ecological crises, and agriculture will bear the brunt of it. For example, in the Neolithic Age, under the impact of the cold period more than 5500 years ago, both early Chinese civilization and early Western civilization faced decline, and human beings had to relearn and develop agriculture many times.

Agriculture relies heavily on climate, and Agriculture 1.0 is the earliest form of agriculture in prehistory. From Agriculture 1.0 to Agriculture 4.0: Ecological Transition and Agricultural Sustainability (from Agriculture 1.0 to Agriculture 4.0) starts with historical climate change and concludes that for every 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature over the past 50 years, food production has fallen by 5%. However, the author believes that it is not this factor that has the greatest impact on agricultural development, but that more and more countries are developing large-scale agricultural production in accordance with the developed national system, and the environmental disasters caused by them are getting worse and worse. Since 1990, about 75 per cent of crops have been lost from arable land, and the resilience of agricultural systems to disasters has been impacted. The authors argue that this agricultural production also induces an ecological crisis. China's thousands of years of agricultural civilization have mainly relied on the harmonious and symbiotic relationship between diversified comprehensive management and natural diversity. Professor Wen Tiejun has repeatedly quoted Einstein's famous words to remind people: "It is impossible for human beings to solve problems by creating problems." "When agriculture is industrialized, there are many problems, we are deeply trapped in the dilemma of development, we must have innovative ideas to solve the problem." Ecology is the way out of human civilization, and it is also the core essence of agriculture to get out of the predicament and enter sustainable development. John Cobb Jr., an academician of the National Academy of Humanities and Sciences and an ecological economist, once pointed out that "China has brought a light of hope to the construction of global ecological civilization."

Agriculture 1.0 corresponds to large colonial farms, and the mainland is difficult to emulate it and take the road of large-scale agriculture due to the hard constraints of resource endowments. Agriculture 2.0 corresponds to facility agriculture and factory agriculture, and in recent years has faced high losses and serious negative environmental externalities. Agriculture 3.0 corresponds to tertiary agriculture, which is diversified because of its combination with different forms of natural conditions and social resources. Agriculture 4.0 is socialized ecological agriculture. Through the Internet and other tools, the non-economic functions such as education, culture and historical inheritance contained in the multi-functional attributes of agriculture are highlighted, driving the rural economy to re-embed the local society, the rural economy to embed the resource environment, and finally achieve a new era of ecological civilization in which human beings re-embed nature.

The development of agriculture can only go its own way

In the second chapter of From Agriculture 1.0 to Agriculture 4.0, the authors specifically introduce several major models of agricultural development. The Anglo-Saxon model mainly exists in English-speaking countries and their surrounding areas that are more affected by it, such as Mexico, the Philippines and other countries. These areas highly follow the principles of market economy, implement large-scale integrated agricultural models, and carry out high-input and high-consumption agricultural production through large-scale operation, mechanized production, single planting, and market-oriented sales.

The Rhine model is mainly in Europe, belongs to small and medium-sized farm agriculture, due to the small population, per capita resources are relatively rich, with a certain social agriculture, ecology, green and other characteristics.

The authors point out that the Anglo-Saxon model relies on cost transfer to developing countries, while the Rhine model is too burdened by government finances to increase productivity.

Asia has a relatively large number of developing countries, a relatively large population, and fewer per capita resources, especially in China, so it has developed an east Asian indigenous agriculture, mainly represented by China, Japan, and South Korea. This East Asian agricultural model is an economic form of small-scale agriculture and handicraft production on a household basis, with an economic operation mechanism of self-risk and self-financing. Among them, self-employed farmers are the most common and representative. The East Asian agricultural model is mainly represented by China, and even with Chinese culture as the core.

A masterpiece that systematically introduces traditional agriculture in China, Japan and Korea is the American agronomist Franklin M. H. King's Four Thousand Years of The Farmer, which argues that East Asian agriculture is harmonious agriculture. China has more mountains and few plains, dominated by the East Asian monsoon climate, rain and heat at the same time, and the "relationship between man and land" is tense. As we all know, China's arable land resources account for only 7% of the world's total, water resources account for 6.4% of the world's total, since ancient times the population density has been very large, living conditions and population growth by natural resource conditions directly and strongly constrained. Each dynasty in China maintained a population of tens of millions, and the total population of the Song Dynasty began to exceed 100 million. The national political form of the Great Unification of the Qing Dynasty lasted for more than 280 years, and the population size reached 400 million.

According to the research reports of foreign scholars, there are currently about 1200 species of plants cultivated in the world, of which 200 species originate directly from the mainland. The traditional agricultural economy is characterized by stable development and sustainability. 12,000-13,000 years ago, China entered the early Neolithic age. During this period, some people in the Yangtze River Basin, the Pearl River Basin, the southeast coast and the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau area lived by hunting and gathering, and the other part lived on rice cultivation. At the same time, the North China Plain and the Loess Plateau region were mainly dryland agriculture based on millet production, while in the northern part of the northeast, the Mengxin Plateau, and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, due to the dry and cold climate, it was still mainly hunter-gatherers. The small rural community system of family units is to share water conservancy, which is related to the imbalance of monsoon precipitation in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and people are forced to organize to build water conservancy systems. For thousands of years, China has not only had settlements of villages due to water conservancy, but also the inheritance of virtue rule based on water.

By combing through the historical reasons for the formation of traditional agriculture, the author concludes that adhering to ecological civilization is an objective result of China's historical evolution over the past five thousand years, not a subjective choice. Self-cultivation agriculture must ensure sustainability and maintain the re-productive capacity of the land, so it is naturally organic and biodiverse. Due to the large population, land must be divided equally among the whole society. At this time, official institutions or governments played an important role, and even dominated, which is also very obvious in Japan and South Korea.

If East Asian countries do not follow the objective laws and cultural connotations of their own agricultural development models and copy the Anglo-Saxon model or the Rhine model, they will inevitably cause contradictions and damage to the ecological environment. On the basis of the comparison of models, the author argues that East Asian agriculture can only go its own way. By comparing the origin and development paths of agricultural civilizations in the East and the West, the author points out that "following the concept of the unity of heaven and man, the Taoist law and nature, and seeking the road of sustainable development" is the only choice for human beings today to pursue survival and development, and it is also the responsibility of China as a country with a civilization history of more than 5,000 years and a tradition of ecological civilization to all mankind.

Rural areas become "resource integrators"

The book devotes three chapters to sustainable agriculture and practical cases at home and abroad. The author believes that agriculture has the attributes of "production, life and ecology", and the countryside has the characteristics of "coexistence, symbiosis and sharing"; the sustainable development of China's agriculture must take into account the livelihood of farmers, rural employment and the sustainability of the ecosystem.

Domestic cases may be more difficult to replicate in other regions because of their limited availability of information and the fact that some experimental practices are still in their infancy. The geographical, climatic and agricultural resources of various regions in China vary greatly, and it is necessary to design or choose an appropriate sustainable development model according to local conditions and local conditions. Nevertheless, the author summarizes the development recommendations for Chinese agriculture from the common aspect.

The countermeasure proposed by the author is, first of all, to carry out organizational changes and strengthen the rural collective economy. The No. 1 Document of the Central Committee in 2019 proposes to take the reform of rural property relations as the main content. Under the new situation, it is necessary to take credit cooperation as the main body and production, supply and marketing cooperation as the two wings, and form a "three-in-one" agricultural complex covering counties, towns, and villages. The second is the model change, drawing on the advantages of traditional agriculture to promote three-dimensional circular agriculture and achieve low mining, high utilization and low emissions. The reduced production model and the ecological industrial park model can meet the public's demand for organic food and leisure and health culture. With the support of traditional agricultural product planting industries such as fruits and vegetables, combined with agricultural activities such as picking, planting, planting, and ploughing, the development of circular agriculture featuring pastoral entertainment experience, ecological health care and other agricultural affairs and agricultural fun experience has a broad future for development.

In order to make these countermeasures long-term, it is also necessary to promote strategic changes, three-dimensional development of rural natural resources, promote the value of ecological resources, enhance the "value" of green waters and green mountains, enlarge the "value" of Jinshan Yinshan, and realize the capitalization of ecological resources with the increase in the value of ecological resources.

At present, some regions have completed the system of equity setting and negotiated pricing in the primary market, so that the village collective as a "resource integrator" has formed a transaction contract structure for the villagers' equity. Village collectives in some areas have introduced foreign investment entities to form a combination of investment and diversified development of resources. The income from the assets obtained by the village collective is returned to the villagers according to the shares after a certain deduction is made, which becomes the property income of the peasants. In order to promote the direct financing of resource assets and activate a large number of local financial investments that occupy a large number of pressures, all localities should further promote the securitization of entrusted transactions of rural collective equity assets, realize the separable trading of global ecological assets, and dock with external excess financial capital.

The capitalization of agricultural resources is a long-term process, and its objects are different as social needs change. The sustainable development of rural areas everywhere should be adapted to local conditions and combined with new needs to exert creativity, rather than following the same development path.

This book is also particularly enlightening for the introduction of foreign agricultural sustainable development cases. Both China and the West are experiencing growing demand for organic agricultural products and agricultural recreation activities among urban dwellers, and Germany's citizen farms give citizens the opportunity to plant flowers, plants, fruit and trees on rural land, experience the joys of agricultural production and farming, and farmers are also changing their identities to work in the cities. Community-supported agriculture in the United States is also related to citizen agriculture, and the operation of organic agricultural products is very suitable for the current situation of family cultivation in rural China.

We see that it is urbanization that offers new opportunities for the sustainable development of modern agriculture. "Agriculture 4.0" is a development and change, and the book sorts out this process, but it is far from a conclusion, and the author prefers to trigger a new topic that everyone is paying more and more attention to.

Source: Liberation Daily