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Subsidy to lift income of grain growers
(China Daily)
Updated: 2004-04-20 00:22 A 287 yuan (US$35) grain subsidy handed out during
the weekend and an exemption from the agricultural tax will lift Li Shuhai's net
profit by 1,000 yuan (US$121) this year.
That sum of money may be insignificant for most urban residents, but it is a
boon for Li, a grain farmer in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.
He is one of several hundred million Chinese grain growers struggling to make
ends meet.
An official with the Ministry of Finance said it is difficult to give an
exact figure on the number of recipients as the subsidies are being paid
according to the size of their plots.
And the subsidized items are rolling.
The Ministry of Agriculture announced Monday it would offer subsidies for
selected seeds of rice, soybean, wheat and corn to major grain producers across
the country.
For example, a farmer will get 150 yuan (US$18) for each hectare of high
oil-bearing soybeans in Heilongjiang Province, according to a news release from
the ministry.
"We will grow more grain, better grain in return," Li said after he was paid
the subsidy in Gushanzi Village of Jidong County in the province.
The farmer said he is confident his family would earn at least 10,000 yuan
(US$1,219) in net profits this year from his two hectares of farmland "if
everything goes smoothly."
The Chinese Government allocated 10 billion yuan (US$1.21 billion) in
subsidies earlier this year from its grain risk fund to the country's grain
farmers in 13 major provincial grain-producing areas to reverse the continuous
drop of grain output and sluggish income growth to narrow the widening gap
between rich and poor.
Apart from Heilongjiang, the 13 provincial areas include the provinces of
Jilin, Liaoning, Hebei, Henan, Jiangsu, Anhui, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan, Jiangxi,
Shandong, and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
From 1997 to 2003, the per capita income of farmers rose 4 per cent annually
on average, in sharp contrast to an 8 per cent jump in the disposable income of
urban dwellers.
Farmers have complained planting grain crops is less lucrative than growing
fruit or raising fish or poultry, which experts fear as a potential threat to
the country's food safety.
The unprecedented subsidies and soaring grain prices due to concerns over
grain shortage in the past few months have boosted the interest of farmers in
cereal production.
Zhang Xiaoshan, director of the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences, said the massive subsidies send a strong message to
Chinese farmers that the State supports grain production.
Wan Baorui, former deputy minister of agriculture, said China used to earmark
tens of billions of yuan in subsidies for the State-owned grain distributing and
wholesaling sector which, in an indirect way,subsidized grain production.
But grain growers benefited little from the subsidies as they went to the
State-owned grain sector, which operated at a loss and had, until recently, a
monopoly over grain purchase and the wholesale business, said
Wan.
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