Strengthening the property right intensity of land contracting right may be counterproductive.
Many people believe that in order to promote the transfer of contracted land management rights, it is necessary to make farmers' contracting rights bigger and more practical. Only in this way can the contractor transfer the land with confidence. Influenced by this idea, the focus of the current reform of "separation of powers" is to continuously improve the property rights intensity of farmers' contracting rights. One is to give farmers the right to dispose of land circulation, the other is to fix farmers' contracting right to special plots in the work of land confirmation registration and certification, and the third is to set contractual management right as usufructuary right. In this way, the land contracting right has realized a major change from the autonomy of production and operation to the usufructuary right and even the "quasi-ownership". In terms of agricultural management and land circulation, farmers in China have basically the same land rights as Japanese farmers. According to Japan's experience and lessons, under the condition of small-scale and scattered possession of land, if private property rights of land are strengthened, the circulation of management rights will be hindered. Our investigation in rural areas found that with the increasing privatization of farmers' land rights, the Japanese land circulation dilemma is also widespread in rural areas of China.
First, land has become the private property of farmers. Farmers regard land as a means of maintaining and increasing value, or "homesickness" and family property, preferring to give up land rather than transfer it out. In the period of urbanization expansion, farmers generally have the expectation of land acquisition, even if they don't plant land, they will wait for the land to appreciate. Farmers in East Asia generally have a feeling of cherishing the land. Land is not only a pure factor of production, but also the family property and ancestral business of farmers, and it also gives farmers the concept of hometown. Even if farmers are unwilling to cultivate the land, they may not transfer it out, which makes the abandonment of agricultural land and the low land transfer rate coexist. In 20 10, 396,000 hectares of Japanese cultivated land were abandoned, accounting for about 10% of the total cultivated land in China.
Second, farmers become "second landlords" and raise land rent by virtue of their powerful land contracting rights, which leads to the result that "land rent erodes profits". Our rural survey in Shanghai found that the net income per mu of land after deducting production costs was only 1 10,000 yuan. However, the local land transfer rent is generally as high as 800- 1000 yuan, and some land rents even reach 1500 yuan. A village has 2700 mu of land, and the rent per mu is 1000 yuan. Because no one wants to flow into the land, it can only be managed by village collectives and district agricultural committees. Some farmers even ask the local government to arrange jobs for them and provide old-age insurance, otherwise they will not transfer their land, which will make it impossible for all farmers to transfer their land. The land contract management system has become to protect the rights of the "second landlord" to collect rent, rather than to protect the rights of the operators who actually cultivate the land.
Third, farmers' increasingly strengthened land rights are more difficult to integrate, which hinders the centralized and contiguous transfer of land. Different farmers have different willingness to transfer land. On the willingness to transfer, some farmers are willing to cultivate land, some farmers are willing to transfer some land, some farmers are willing to transfer all land, and some farmers decide whether to transfer land according to the level of land rent. In terms of circulation time, some farmers are willing to circulate for a long time, some farmers are willing to circulate for a short time, and some farmers only circulate seasonally. Under the condition of land fragmentation, farmers' willingness to transfer is different, which leads to the dispersion of land transfer. Because the land circulation is not concentrated and contiguous, many large farmers give up land circulation and scale operation. Our investigation in Shayang County, Hubei Province found that Zhao transferred the land of Group 7 170 mu in Zhaocun, involving 22 households, and 2 households were unwilling to transfer it. Zhao not only relies on village cadres to coordinate various relationships with farmers in the process of land transfer, but also has many disputes with farmers who have not transferred land in the process of land use: inconsistent pest control, irrigation and drainage disputes, mechanical seedling destruction and so on. After Zhao Management 1 year, land circulation will be abandoned, and some land can only be abandoned.
Although the reform of "separation of powers" emphasizes the implementation of collective ownership, the increasingly strengthened "ownership" of contracting rights objectively obscures collective ownership, which makes the peasant collectives lose the function of collective unified management in the two-tier management system of unification and separation. Because of owning a small piece of land, the reform of "separation of powers" emphasizes the protection of farmers' land contracting rights, which makes it difficult for farmers to realize their right to transfer. This is actually a paradox of "protecting farmers' rights but harming farmers' interests". Moreover, because the land contracting right is bigger and stronger, the land rent is too high and the land is scattered, which reduces the enthusiasm of operators to flow into the land. It can be considered that the reform of "separation of powers" takes strengthening the contracting right as a means, but it overheads the collective ownership and rigidifies the land management right.
Collective ownership is the way out.
In the rural survey, we found that some rural areas have realized centralized and contiguous land transfer by implementing collective ownership and giving full play to the function of collective resource allocation. Taking Fanchang County in Anhui Province as an example, farmers have the right to choose whether to transfer land, and farmers collectively allocate land resources according to their own wishes. Farmers who are willing to cultivate land get contiguous contracted land from the collective, farmers collectively transfer the land of migrant workers in contiguous areas, and migrant workers get land rent. Farmers' collectives are readjusted every 5- 10 years to regroup farmers' willingness to enter and leave the land.
The wishes and interests of farmers are not immutable. For example, for farmers who go out to work, what matters is not the right to contract specific plots, but the right to continue farming the land after returning to the countryside. The practice of Fanchang County is to realize farmers' land contracting rights in different ways according to their different wishes, and this flexibility matches the differences and variability of farmers' needs. Farmers who need to cultivate land can get centralized and contiguous contracted land, and they can transfer land when necessary. Farmers who go out to work can get land rent by valuing the land contracting right, and they can continue to cultivate the contracted land when they return to the countryside in the future.
Operators can get three benefits, thus truly activating land management rights. First, the operator only needs to negotiate with the village collective, and does not need to negotiate with dozens or even thousands of farmers, which reduces the transaction cost of land transfer. Second, the allocation of collective resources has solved the problems of scattered land circulation and "planting flowers" caused by the difference of farmers' land circulation, and operators can obtain concentrated contiguous land. Third, the land transfer period is 5- 10 years, which stabilizes the production expectations of operators. In the decentralized land circulation stage, a family farm in Fanchang County can only manage about 50 mu of land. This is not only because family farmers can't negotiate with a large number of farmers and get enough land, but also because the land circulation is not concentrated and contiguous, which limits the scale of agricultural operation. In the stage of centralized land circulation, the land management area of family farms in Fanchang County is generally between 100-300 mu.
The core of this land circulation mode is to effectively implement the right of collective ownership to allocate land resources, maximize the interests of land contractors and stimulate the enthusiasm of land operators. This land transfer mode has realized the organic unity of fairness and efficiency. Land contracting rights are distributed according to the principle of fairness, farmers have the right to cultivate land, and migrant farmers can get land rent if they don't cultivate land, which realizes the fair distribution of land and the stability of rural society. Land management rights are allocated according to the principle of efficiency, and farmers collectively transfer their unwilling land to scale operators through market-oriented methods, thus promoting the improvement of land use efficiency. Collective ownership of land can easily solve the problem of separation of people and land, and centralized and contiguous land circulation can be realized when the rural population is not completely non-agricultural.
The legitimacy of farmers' collective allocation of land resources lies in the fact that China adopts collective ownership of land, which is a collective public means of production, not a private property of farmers, and the collective can allocate land resources according to farmers' needs. On the contrary, Japan adopts private ownership of land, and villages or village communities have no right to allocate land resources, so it is difficult to effectively integrate subdivided land resources, and it is difficult to expand the scale of land management by transferring land with scattered farmers as the main body. According to Japan's experience and lessons, it may be counterproductive to continuously strengthen farmers' land rights in the case of land subdivision and farmers' love for land. Fanchang's experience and practice show that giving full play to the function of collective land resource allocation and realizing centralized contiguous land transfer can better realize the rights of land contractors. The reform of "separation of powers" should be wary of entering the "Japanese trap", and the realization of its reform goal depends on how to truly and effectively implement collective ownership and its land resource allocation function.