World Agriculture
Developments, trade, data, and topics in world agriculture
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Experience and Reference of Agricultural and Rural Modernization in Developed CountriesExperience and Reference of Agricultural and Rural Modernization in Developed Countries hu Glacier in the process of agricultural and rural modernization, there are common factors and consistent characteristics. Combing the process of agricultural and rural modernization in developed countries, especially, compared with the agricultural and rural development in developed countries since the 1960 s, it can be observed that great changes have taken place in the mode of agricultural production, the supply of agricultural products, the progress of agricultural technology and the form of rural living. By comparing the experience of developed countries, it is not difficult to find that the existing urban-rural integration development is still based on the artificial construction of the traditional dual perspective, and the future modernization path is more inclined to the unified endogenous evolution. Obviously, people who live in the "countryside" are not necessarily "farmers". China is in the transition stage to a high-income country. It is particularly important to learn from the development experience of agricultural and rural modernization in developed countries, summarize the enlightenment of agricultural specialization, urban-rural integration development, agricultural support and protection, and explore the endogenous evolution path suitable for China's development.
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Construction and Enlightenment of Japanese Agricultural Management SystemSince the beginning of the new century, the development of various types of new agricultural business entities and the promotion of large-scale operations have become a strategic choice for my country to accelerate the construction of modern agriculture and promote the simultaneous development of industrialization, informatization, urbanization and agricultural modernization. Japan and China belong to the small-scale peasant society in East Asia, and have high similarity in cultural background, resource endowment and production conditions. An in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the construction of Japan's agricultural management system is of great significance for promoting the construction of new agricultural management entities in China. The Development Status and Characteristics of Agricultural Business Entities in Japan changes in the internal composition of (I) household operations and declining numbers in Japan, the sale of farmers and agricultural management body is the main force of agricultural production in Japan. Sales farmers refer to those who operate more than 0.3 hectares of arable land or whose sales of agricultural products in the past year are more than 500000 yen. In addition, there are "self-sufficiency farmers" and "land-owning non-farmers". From 2011 to 2014, Japan's sales of farmers decreased from 1.5611 million to 1.4116 million, a decrease of 9.6, but its share of the total increased by 2.5 percentage points. The degree of sideline selling farmers is deepening, and the degree of part-time farming is serious. In 2014, the number of agricultural operators in Japan was 1.4712 million, 146400 fewer than in 2011, a decrease of 9%. The composition of agricultural operators has changed, the number of family operators is slowly decreasing while the size of the family operators is expanding, while the number of organizational operators is increasing and the trend of corporatization is increasing. (II) agricultural legal person management has begun to take shape in recent years, as the government continues to lift the restrictions on companies and other legal person organizations engaged in agriculture, the organization and operation body has achieved rapid development. From the perspective of land transfer, the area of cultivated land transferred by the organization management body accounted for 70.9 of the total management area in 2014, far higher than the level of 33.8 of agricultural management bodies. The average operating area of each organization is 24.63 hectares, which is also much higher than the average level of agricultural operators. The scale of agricultural management has gradually expanded, and land circulation has become an important means. Among them, the concentration trend of the scale of the organization and management body is particularly obvious, and gradually become the main force of land circulation. In recent years, the trend of legalization of agricultural management in Japan is obvious, and the expansion of legalized agricultural management mainly depends on the increase in the number of companies and agricultural combined legal persons. rapid development of (III) colony farming collecting farming organizations mainly refer to agricultural management organizations that carry out common services and unified operations on a certain or all aspects of the agricultural production process. In recent years, the rapid development of agricultural organizations in the colony, agricultural production has gradually become the mainstream form of joint organization. Agribusiness organizations play an active role in supporting regional agriculture, especially in serving small and medium-sized farmers. The Enlightenment of the Development of Japanese Agricultural Management System to China (I) Support the Development of Specialized Farmers and Accelerate the Cultivation of New Professional Farmers in order to alleviate the trend of part-time and aging of agricultural labor force and encourage the concentration of agricultural land to "backbone farmers", Japan has established a system of identifying farmers. Under the impetus of this system, land is rapidly concentrated to those who identify agriculture, accelerating the effective and intensive use of agricultural land. Drawing lessons from Japan's experience in setting up "Youth Agricultural School" and "backbone Farmers' subsidy", China should pay more attention to the training of young professional farmers while supporting the development of professional farmers, and formulate a medium-and long-term plan for the training of new farmers at the national level. (II) cultivate new business entities and promote the legalization of agricultural operations Family farms, cooperatives and enterprises all belong to market legal persons. Compared with traditional farmers, the legalization of agricultural management can, on the one hand, promote the separation of livelihood and management, turn farmers into commodity producers and operators who operate independently and assume responsibility for their own profits and losses, and improve the level of specialization and intensification; on the other hand, it is conducive to agricultural operators to break the boundaries of regional departments and ownership, develop various forms of horizontal economic association, and improve the level of scale and organization. At present, my country's new agricultural business entities are still facing problems such as small scale, irregular operation, and insufficient development. Drawing on the experience of Japan, my country should clearly define the norms, identification methods and registration methods of new business entities such as large professional households, family farms, farmer cooperatives, and leading enterprises as soon as possible, and promptly formulate policies and measures to support new agricultural business entities to promote the health of corporate agriculture. Orderly development. (III) Innovate the Mode of Agricultural Operation Organization and Encourage the Development of Joint Organization of Agricultural Production with the support of the Japanese government, the alliance and cooperation between various agricultural operators have been continuously deepened, and various types of agricultural production joint organizations have been formed, such as joint utilization organizations, collective cultivation organizations and trusteeship service organizations. Drawing on the experience of Japan, China should actively encourage the association and cooperation between various agricultural business entities and explore the cultivation of various types of agricultural production joint organizations. (IV) Promote the New Mechanism of Agricultural Socialization Service and Accelerate the Construction of New Agricultural Management System the most distinctive feature of Japanese agriculture is the agricultural socialized service system of "combination of government and people. The government-led popularization guidance system and the agricultural management guidance system led by the Agricultural Association provide agricultural science and technology services for all aspects of Japanese agriculture from production to sales and all aspects of rural life, effectively promoting the development of Japanese agriculture and rural areas. In addition, through the revision of laws and system reforms, the Japanese government has implemented a series of policies and measures to promote the circulation of agricultural land and large-scale operation, promote the common development of family management, legal person management and centralized agricultural management, and initially build an agricultural management system with clear structure, complementary functions and dynamic adjustment. Drawing on the experience of Japan, while strengthening the construction of public welfare service organizations, my country should accelerate the cultivation of operational service institutions, explore and innovate social service models, and form an organic combination of public services, cooperative services, and market-oriented services, overall coordination, and comprehensive development. Agricultural socialized service system. Source: China Agricultural Economic Information Network | Time: July 11, 2015 | Responsible Editor: Zhai Tianchang
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The Experience of Land Circulation in Japan for the Promotion of Land Circulation in ChinaSummary: through the introduction of the effective measures taken in the process of land circulation in Japan, and after analyzing the characteristics of the land circulation system in Japan, this paper summarizes that only by constantly improving the legislation, giving full play to the positive role of the market economy, increasing financial support, and constantly training the quality of agricultural practitioners, and establishing agricultural cooperation organizations, can we promote the promotion of land circulation in China. Keywords: japan, land circulation, system, China 1. Japanese Land Circulation System 1. The change of Japan's land system in the existing literature, the most detailed introduction to the reform of Japan's land system is the book "Japan's land system" by Japanese writer Guan Gu Jun, which divides the Japanese land system into three stages through a comprehensive textual research on the Japanese land system. In the first stage, the Japanese government used strong means to abolish the feudal and semi-feudal land ownership system, and clearly stipulated the system of using self-cultivation farmers, and vigorously promoted the small-scale, family-based possession and management strategy represented by "the tiller has his land". For the first time, land ownership was combined with the right to use. From 1946 to 1950, the government chose to use tough measures to purchase landlowners' land and resell the acquired land to farmers who had no or little land at that time. After this series of land reforms, Japan finally established the system of self-cultivation in its own country. The proportion of self-cultivation rose to 88% of the total agricultural output, and the proportion of cultivated land even reached 90%. At this stage, the Japanese government controlled the scale of agricultural land within 3hm2. In order to further ensure the effectiveness of land reform, the Japanese government also promulgated the "Agricultural Land Law" in 1952. Since then, Japan has established a modern agricultural management method characterized by small-scale family management. In the early 1950 s, the total number of farmers in Japan was 6.18 million, with an average arable land area of 0.8 hm2 per household. Among this group of people, the number of farmers within 1hm2 was about 77.5 per cent of the total number, while the number of farmers within 2hm2 was only 3.5 per cent of the total population. In the second stage, the Japanese government began to try to relax the restrictions on land ownership transfer, advocate land transfer and relatively centralized methods, and encourage farmers to consciously expand the scale of land ownership. The government formally introduced the "Basic Law on Agriculture" in 1961. Its main purpose is to greatly increase agricultural productivity and reduce the productivity gap between agriculture and the domestic secondary and tertiary industries. Efforts should be made to improve the income level of the agricultural population and reduce the gap between different employees. Therefore, in this law, the government pays great attention to the implementation of other measures to enhance farmers' enthusiasm for expanding agricultural production, which is mainly reflected in the amendment to the Basic Agricultural Law issued in 1962, which stipulates that the amount of land that farmers can own is limited to more than the 3hm2 limit required by the Agricultural Land Law issued in 1952, however, the premise is that this part of the farmer can only use the labor belonging to the family. The law also allows farmers who have left their villages to work in cities to entrust their land to small-scale agricultural cooperatives and ask them to farm instead. In the third stage, the Japanese government shifted the core of agricultural land reform from ownership to use system. Under the premise of small-scale family possession of agricultural land, it encouraged the development of cooperative enterprises and expanded the scale of operation. The government encouraged farmers to separate land ownership and use rights. In the middle and late 20th century, the Japanese government gradually changed from encouraging the centralized possession of agricultural land by the agricultural population to the mode of decentralized possession and centralized operation. Since the 1970 s, the Japanese government has continuously introduced a number of laws and regulations to promote land reform and adjustment, encouraging farmers to minimize the problems caused by decentralized management through various forms of collaborative production such as farmland leasing and operation entrustment. 2. The characteristics of Japan's agricultural land transfer system First of all, the Japanese government according to the actual situation, timely and effective to improve the land system, is the key to ensure the smooth progress of land transfer. Through the timely and effective regulation of the tenancy relationship in the abandoned restricted agricultural land, the government has made a very useful attempt to promote the separation of agricultural land ownership and management rights, and finally laid the necessary foundation for the large-scale operation based on leasing. The Japanese government successively carried out deeper and larger-scale second and third revisions to the Agricultural Land Law in 1970 and 1982. The consequence of this revision is that the threshold for land leasing has been further reduced, and farmers are involved in it. The enthusiasm has been greatly improved. Since the government recognizes that farmers who leave the land have the right to lease land from the legal level, this provides necessary legal support for private land transfer. In the 1980 s, the Japanese government introduced the "Agricultural Land Use Promotion Law", which determined the lease of land and promoted the flow of land management rights. Secondly, the government actively set up cooperative economic organizations as intermediary agencies, which is a powerful measure to promote the smooth progress of land circulation. Agricultural cooperative organizations follow the principle of unified management and unified purchase. Thirdly, the Japanese government has also implemented a system called identifying farmers, which provides a very important guarantee for ensuring the direction of land transfer. Enlightenment of 2. Japanese Land Transfer Experience to Promote the Development of Land Transfer in China 1. The government plays an active leading role. By analyzing the characteristics of different stages of agricultural land transfer in Japan, we can find that in the process of land transfer in Japan, the government has played a very important role in the policy formulation at the macro level, the policy support for intermediary organizations and the protection of farmers' rights and interests in the specific implementation process. The government's multi-party efforts have played a pivotal role in ensuring the smooth progress of land transfer. The author believes that in the process of promoting China's land circulation, the government should also give full play to the active leading role. Active legislation adjusts the current relevant laws and regulations on the premise of ensuring the unwavering implementation of the household contract management system. Specifically, we can start from the following three aspects: First, formulate laws and regulations suitable for land transfer. Second, following the laws of the market, government work is "not absent" and not "offside" in the management process ". Third, the government needs to give corresponding financial subsidies as appropriate. In the process of land transfer, farmers will inevitably bear some market risks. The government should give necessary subsidies to ensure that farmers participate in land transfer at lower risks. 2. Give full play to the intermediary role of agricultural cooperative organizations in the market. Japanese agricultural cooperative organizations have always played an important intermediary and bridge role in the process of agricultural land transfer. It is precisely because of the participation of agricultural cooperative organizations that land transfer has been qualitatively improved in terms of speed and efficiency. In view of its important role in land transfer, the Chinese government should also support it at the policy level. References: feng Zhendong, Huo Li, Shao Chuanlin. 2010. A Review of Studies on Rural Land Circulation in China [J]. Journal of Northwest University: Philosophy and Social Sciences (2):78-80. Ke Hui Bing. 2010. Public Economics Analysis of Social Security Transfer Payment [J]. Contemporary Finance and Economics (8):68-69. Xiang Yicai, Wu Zhongyu. 2011. The Defects of China's Current Social Security System and Its Improvement Countermeasures [J]. Journal of Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics (5):102-103. Xiong Hongfang, Deng Xiaohong. 2010. The Enlightenment of American and Japanese Farmland Transfer System to China [J]. Agricultural Economy (11):23-24. Zhou Jianguo. 2011. On the Procedural Legal Guarantee of the Orderly Circulation of the Right to Contract Management of Farmland [J]. Journal of Guangxi Administrative Cadre College of Politics and Law (1):105-106. Zou Suqin, Ni Hanjuan. 2010. Study on the Forms and Trends of Rural Collective Land Circulation [J]. Journal of Heilongjiang Institute of Socialism (1):89-90 source: China Agricultural Economic Information Network | Time: August 26, 2015 | Responsible Editor: Zhai Tianchang
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Review and Prospect of Grain Market in the First Half of 2015In the first half of 1., domestic grain prices showed a steady oscillation since 2015, the domestic grain market has generally shown a stable trend, with slight ups and downs in different varieties and periods. Among them, the trend of wheat, rice and corn is relatively stable. Affected by the implementation of the target price subsidy policy, the price of soybeans has fallen significantly. According to monitoring, as of the end of June, the national raw grain purchase price index of China Grain Storage 149.31, down 0.15 percent from the beginning of the year and up 0.47 percent from the same period last year. The wheat purchase price index was 139.36, down 2.5 percent from the beginning of the year and up 0.7 percent from the same period last year; the rice purchase price index was 151.5, up 0.2 percent from the beginning of the year and up 3.4 percent from the same period last year; the corn purchase price index was 153.25, up 0.6 percent from the beginning of the year and down 2.5 percent from the same period last year; the soybean purchase price index was 108.04, down 5.9 percent from the beginning of the year, it was down 10.9 per cent from a year earlier. See by variety: wheat: In the first half of 2015, domestic wheat prices as a whole showed a weak operating pattern due to relatively sufficient market supply and continued weak terminal demand. With the new wheat harvest and listing in late May, the price of the main production areas is generally low. After the start of the purchase plan, the purchase price of wheat rebounded slightly and fluctuated steadily near the purchase price of the market. According to monitoring, in late June, the factory price of ordinary white wheat in Zhengzhou, Henan Province was 1.22 yuan/jin, down 0.06 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year; the factory price of ordinary white wheat in Jinan, Shandong Province was 1.2 yuan/jin, down 0.06 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year; the factory price of ordinary white wheat in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province was 1.23 yuan/jin, down 0.07 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year; the year; the arrival price of ordinary white wheat in Guangzhou was 1.26 yuan/jin, it was down 0.065 yuan/kg from the beginning of the year. Rice: In the first half of the year, national policies continued to dominate the trend of the rice market, and domestic rice prices maintained a steady and slightly rising trend. The pattern of "strong rice and weak rice" and "excellent strong and generally weak" was obvious. Among them, the price of japonica rice rose steadily at the beginning of the year and remained stable. However, with the restriction of the centralized auction of national policy rice and the rotation of local grain reserves, the price of japonica rice has stagnated, and the price in some areas has decreased slightly. The overall price of indica rice is stable and weak. Due to the continuous impact of low-priced imported rice, the centralized auction of policy-oriented rice and the rotation of grain reserves at all levels, the market supply of indica rice is abundant and the price is running at a low level, but the price of high-quality indica rice continues to rise. At the end of June, from the perspective of japonica rice prices, the purchase price of japonica rice in eastern Heilongjiang was 1.57 yuan/jin, an increase of 0.02 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year; the purchase price of japonica rice in Nanjing, Jiangsu was 1.53 yuan/jin, a decrease of 0.02 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year. Judging from the price of indica rice, the purchase price of early indica rice in Hunan is 1.275 yuan/jin, down 0.105 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year, while the purchase price of medium and late indica rice in Hunan is 1.425 yuan/jin, up 0.045 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year. Affected by the difference between supply and demand, the overall performance of domestic rice prices in the first half of the year was "new strong and old weak". According to monitoring, at the end of June, from the perspective of the price of japonica rice, the wholesale price of japonica rice in Beijing was 2.33 yuan/jin, a decrease of 0.03 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year; the wholesale price of japonica rice in Shanghai was 2.13 yuan/jin, an increase of 0.02 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year. Judging from the price of indica rice, the wholesale price of indica rice in Changsha is 2.05 yuan/jin, up 0.1 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year, while the wholesale price of high-quality late indica rice in Guangzhou is 2.175 yuan/jin, up 0.005 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year. Corn: In the first half of the year, domestic corn prices showed a narrow oscillation pattern in the first quarter and then rose in the second quarter. The main reason is that this year's temporary storage and purchase volume hit a new high to raise the market expectation of corn prices, but weak consumption and a large number of imports of feed raw materials substitutes such as sorghum and barley depressed corn prices. In the first quarter, with the substantial increase in the purchase of corn from national temporary storage, domestic corn prices began to strengthen overall in March. However, in the case of sluggish demand and a large number of imports of alternative feed ingredients such as sorghum and barley, the overall trend of oscillation was maintained in the second quarter. According to monitoring, at the end of June, the purchase price of corn in Changchun was about 1.085 yuan/jin, up 0.015 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year; the purchase price in Zhaodong area of Heilongjiang was 1.05 yuan/jin, up 0.055 yuan/jin from the beginning of the year; the purchase price in Shijiazhuang was 1.17 yuan/jin, up 0.02 yuan/ton from the beginning of the year; the purchase price in Weifang, Shandong was 1.19 yuan/jin, up 0.10 yuan/jin from the beginning of the beginning of the year; the arrival price of Guangdong port is 1.215 yuan/kg, up 0.0125 yuan/kg from the beginning of the year. Soybeans: Since the beginning of this year, domestic soybean prices have generally shown a weak downward trend. From the perspective of domestic soybeans, affected by the target price subsidy policy, since the large number of new beans were listed last year, growers' reluctance to sell has continued to increase, and the difficulty of acquiring trading entities has increased. In addition, the market demand is limited, and the purchase and sale of domestic soybeans has been light, and the price has fallen sharply at the beginning of the year. Low oscillation; from the perspective of imported soybeans, the first half of this year is in a year, coupled with the abundant global soybean supply and the continuous high level of soybean stocks in domestic ports, the distribution price of domestic imported soybean ports in the first half of the year showed an overall downward trend. According to monitoring, as of the end of June, the purchase price of domestic soybeans in Harbin was 2.0 yuan/jin, down 9.09 percent from the beginning of the year, while the distribution price of imported soybeans in South China ports was 1.51 yuan/jin, down 10.12 percent from the beginning of the year. Edible oil: In 2015, the spot price of domestic edible oil showed a slow upward trend due to the decline in oil inventories and the expected reduction in production of new oilseeds. According to monitoring, at the end of June, the ex-factory price of grade 4 soybean oil in East China was 5800 yuan/ton, up 4.50 percent from the beginning of the year; the sales price of grade 4 rapeseed oil in Hubei was 8000 yuan/ton, up 1.27 percent from the beginning of the year; the sales price of 24-degree palm oil in Guangzhou was 4900 yuan/ton, basically the same as at the beginning of the year; and the ex-factory price of grade 1 peanut oil in Shandong was 14000 yuan, down 13.58 percent. 2. 2015 domestic grain supply and demand maintained a loose pattern in 1. Production. It is estimated that the national grain sown area will be basically stable at about 1.68 billion mu in 2015. Among them, according to data from the Ministry of Agriculture, the sown area of summer grain is expected to be 0.415 billion mu, an increase of more than 100 million mu over the previous year. Due to the overall favorable weather during the growth of summer grain, the total output is expected to achieve another bumper harvest. Comprehensive social grain and oil basic information survey data, the national winter wheat area is expected to be 0.339 billion mu, a year-on-year decrease; the national rice sown area is expected to be about 0.455 billion mu, which is the same as the year-on-year decrease, of which the early indica rice area is about 84 million mu, a year-on-year decrease of 0.6; the national corn sown area is expected to be about 0.568 billion mu, an increase of about 2.16. Due to the generally favorable weather in the main producing areas during the growth period, it is expected that the summer grain output in 2015 will be flat and slightly increase. Among them, the wheat output is expected to be 231 billion kg, an increase of 0.43 year-on-year. According to the survey, adverse weather occurred frequently during the growth of early indica rice in 2015, and the reduction in production is basically a foregone conclusion. It is estimated that the total yield of early indica rice in the country is about 62.34 billion jin, a year-on-year decrease of 4.82. In the period of maturity, harvesting, drying and purchasing in the main producing areas of early indica rice in the south, if there is large-scale rainfall during this period, it may cause the production of early indica rice after delivery, which is not conducive to the purchase, storage and quality assurance. 2. Supply and demand. In 2015, except for soybeans, there is still a large gap, the supply and demand pattern of other major grain varieties will be further relaxed. It is estimated that the annual balance will be more than 130 billion jin, and the domestic grain inventory will reach a record level. See by variety: wheat. Domestic wheat supply is expected to be higher in 2015/16 than in the previous year. According to the comprehensive investigation, it is estimated that the total output of wheat in 2015 will be about 231 billion kg, an increase of 1 billion kg over the previous year. However, due to the rainy weather in some main producing areas during the wheat harvest and listing in early June, the quality of some wheat was affected to a certain extent, especially in many areas of Jiangsu, Anhui, Hubei and southern Henan. From the perspective of demand, domestic wheat consumption is expected to drop by 4.8 billion kg to 222.7 billion kg in 2015/16 due to the steady slight decrease in flour milling consumption and the decline in feed grain consumption, with an estimated new supply and demand balance of about 12 billion kg, and the domestic wheat supply and demand relationship continues to improve. Rice. Affected by various factors such as the sluggish macroeconomic situation, the continuous impact of imported rice, and the sluggish consumption of the domestic rice market, it is expected that the domestic rice market demand will decline slightly in 2015 compared with the same period last year. In the first half of the year, the progress of the national policy rice storage was slow, and the inventory continued to be at a high level. In addition, new rice was successively listed, and the domestic rice market was abundant. On the whole, it is expected that the supply and demand of the domestic rice market this year will be more relaxed than that of the previous year, and the annual balance will reach more than 30 billion kg. Corn. 2015 domestic corn sown area will continue to increase, is expected to increase by 12 million mu over the previous year. Affected by this, it is expected that the total corn output of the country will continue to grow without major natural disasters in the later period. Under this circumstance, affected by the sluggish macroeconomic situation and the slowdown in corn demand growth, it is expected that the domestic corn market will continue to maintain an oversupply pattern in 2015/16, and corn destocking will continue. Soybean and edible oil. It is expected that the domestic soybean production will decrease significantly in 2015, and the rapeseed production will also decline. The total national oilseed production will continue to decline this year. Under the influence of price difference benefit driven and the continuous growth of oil rigid demand, it is expected that China's oil import volume will continue to increase in 2015, but the growth rate will be smaller than that of the previous year. 3. 2015 domestic food prices will be stable, some varieties have downward pressure. In the second half of the year, the macroeconomic situation will continue to restrain food demand. It is expected that under the influence of sufficient national grain stocks, the successive listing of new grains, and policy-based purchasing and storage, domestic grain prices will be mainly stable as a whole, and some varieties will show a weak operating trend. It should be noted that the market rumors that the purchasing and storage policy of corn varieties may change, which will have a greater impact on the market price of corn in the new season. The factors that need to be focused on in the later stage are: first, the domestic and global macroeconomic situation; second, the policy grain and oil auction and storage policy changes; third, the weather changes in the main producing areas and the production of autumn grain. See by variety: wheat. It is expected that the domestic wheat market will show a narrow fluctuation in the later period. The main reasons are as follows: first, the wheat output has increased steadily and slightly this year, and the purchase of new wheat has been started and the scope has been expanded. However, due to the lower than expected quality of new wheat, the obvious difference between the north and the south has affected the enthusiasm of market purchase and sales. The purchase progress is obviously slower than that of the previous year, and the purchase volume of the supporting market is expected to be lower than that of the previous year. Second, the current downstream demand is weak, it is expected that there will still be no significant improvement in the second half of the year; third, due to the macroeconomic impact, the lack of funds in the hands of trading companies, and the lessons learned from the previous year, the enthusiasm for wheat purchases and grain holding is not high; fourth, policy wheat stocks are at a high level. The price of new grain has been suppressed. According to data from the State Grain Administration, as of the end of May, the national policy wheat inventory increased by 72% year. The main factors to be paid attention to in the later period are: first, the purchase progress and quantity of wheat in 2015; The second is the intensity and auction rhythm of policy wheat. The third is the adjustment of the purchase and sale price of policy wheat in 2016. Fourth, the price ratio change of wheat and corn and the substitution of feed; Fifth, the import of major grain varieties and related alternative varieties. Rice. It is expected that the domestic rice market as a whole will show a stable and weak trend in the later period, "new strong and weak", "excellent strong and weak" characteristics continue. The main reasons are as follows: first, the market supply and demand remain loose, and the de stocking progress is slow; second, the operating efficiency of processing enterprises is generally low, and the operating rate is lower than that of the previous year; third, the price level of rice after the listing of new grain will be slightly higher than that of the previous year, but the increase will not be too large; fourth, the global rice production in 2015 is expected to continue to increase, and the low price import rice in the domestic market, from January to May this year, my country imported a total of 2.023 billion catties of rice, a slight decrease of 0.144 billion catties year-on-year, but it is understood that the amount of rice entering the domestic market through border trade and smuggling is still large. The uncertain factors that still need to be paid attention to in the later period are: first, the weather conditions during the harvest of new early indica rice and the growth of mid-late rice, especially the impact of El Nino phenomenon on the production of mid-late rice in the south; The second is the changes in the price and quantity of imported rice in Southeast Asia, as well as the entry of other channels such as border trade. The third is the competitive sales of policy rice and the rotation of old rice. Corn. Low consumption and temporary storage policy adjustments are expected to continue to suppress domestic corn prices in the second half of the year. Although the reduction of grain sources in circulation outside the policy will support the domestic corn price in the third quarter, the adjustment expectation of the temporary storage policy in Northeast China in the new year and the listing of new grain will greatly restrain the domestic corn price in the later period. The main factors affecting domestic corn prices in the later period: First, the current policy corn inventory is huge. As of the end of May, the temporary storage corn inventory has increased by 50% year-on-year. Affected by this, the market can circulate grain sources before the new corn is listed will gradually decrease. Second, corn consumption is generally sluggish. According to the monitoring of the Ministry of Agriculture, the number of live pigs in 4000 monitoring sites dropped to about 0.386 billion in May 2015, while the number of breeding sows dropped to about 39.2 million, the lowest level in many years. At the same time, industrial consumption is also in a difficult situation due to the macroeconomic downturn, and the operating rate is difficult to rise significantly; third, the substitution of feed raw materials for corn has increased rapidly. Affected by the cost advantage of imported feed raw materials, the import volume of sorghum, barley and other varieties continues to increase. It is estimated that the import volume of sorghum and barley may reach 700-8 million tons and 500-6 million tons respectively this year. In addition, the large import of cassava has also formed a certain substitute for the consumption of corn industry. Soybean and edible oil. Against the backdrop of abundant global soybean stocks, as well as the expected continued increase in the area of new U.S. soybean crops, the global soybean supply is more relaxed in the later period, and international soybean prices are expected to continue to decline, leading to a subsequent weakening of domestic imported soybean port distribution prices. Domestic soybeans, in the new season soybean production is expected to continue to decline and the external soybean weakness under the combined effect of domestic soybean prices are expected to remain low narrow oscillation operation. In addition, affected by the gradual fermentation of the El Niño phenomenon, there is a possibility of a large reduction in oil production of palm oil, rapeseed and other oil varieties, and the situation of too loose global oil supply may be improved. Coupled with the obvious digestion of domestic oil stocks, these factors will obviously benefit the oil market and help oil prices to break away from the bottom and show a rebound trend. But in view of the domestic oil demand is still weak, oil prices overall rebound space will be limited. 4. international grain and oil supply and demand relationship to maintain a loose pattern according to the USDA's July supply and demand report, the global grain and oil supply and demand relationship remained loose in 2015/16, with world grain output expected to be 2.477 billion tons, down 0.62 percent from the same period last year. Consumption was 2.485 billion tons, up 0.83 percent from the same period last year. The final inventory was 0.523 billion tons, down 1.46 from the same period last year, and the inventory consumption ratio was 21%, down about 1 percentage point from the previous year, and remaining above the safety warning line. In addition, world oilseed production is expected to be 0.532 billion tons, down 0.77 per cent from the same period last year; consumption is 0.444 billion tons, up 1.96 per cent from the same period last year; and ending inventory is 0.1022 billion tons, up 7.52 per cent from the same period last year. Source: China Grain Network | Time: September 16, 2015 | Responsible Editor: Zhai Tianchang
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Sino-American Corn War~~Corn Wars The farm-by-farm fight between China and the United States to dominate the global food supply. By Ted Genoways Illustration by Brian Stauffer August 16, 2015 On September 30, 2012, agents from the FBI contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago with an urgent request. They wanted bags from two passengers on an outbound flight to Beijing pulled for immediate inspection. The passengers didn't track as dangerous criminals: Li Shaoming, president of Beijing Kings Nower Seed Science & Technology, a large Chinese agricultural company that develops corn, rice, cotton, and canola seeds, and Ye Jian, the company's crop research manager. In Li's luggage, agents found two large Pop Weaver microwave popcorn boxes. Buried under the bags of unpopped snack kernels were roughly 300 tiny manila envelopes, all cryptically numbered-2155, 2403, 20362. Inside each envelope was a single corn seed. In Ye's luggage, agents found more corn seeds hidden amid his clothes, each one individually wrapped in napkins from a Subway restaurant. Customs officers were dispatched to the gate area for the Beijing flight, where they found the two men and conducted body searches. Still more corn seeds, also folded into napkins, were discovered in Ye's pockets. Meanwhile, at a different gate, Wang Hongwei, another Chinese national believed to be in the employ of Kings Nower (agents never learned if he worked for the company or was related to someone who did), boarded a separate flight for Burlington, Vermont, where he had a car waiting for him to drive to Canada. FBI agents were there to follow him-though Wang, after leaving the airport parking garage, made a series of abrupt turns and managed to give his surveillance team the slip. It didn't matter. Border patrol officers were waiting when Wang pulled up to the Highgate Springs port of entry along the U.S.-Canadian border. He was selected out for a search, which turned up 44 bags of corn seeds under his seat and in his suitcases, as well as a notebook filled with GPS coordinates and a digital camera containing hundreds of pictures of cornfields. Questioned by agents, Wang would say only that he had purchased the seeds from a man named Mo Hailong, the director of international business at the Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group (DBN Group), the parent company of Kings Nower Seed. Not wanting to alert Mo, agents allowed all three men to leave the country, but their corn seeds were confiscated. Special Agent Mark E. Betten, a 16-year veteran of the FBI specializing in the investigation of intellectual property theft, had the seeds sent to an independent bio-diagnostic testing laboratory, which confirmed that they were proprietary, genetically modified hybrids. Eventually, their genetic sequencing was matched to seeds under development by Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, and LG Seeds, which, including LG's parent company, Groupe Limagrain, comprise three of the four largest seed companies in the world. The GPS coordinates were found to correspond with farms in Iowa and Illinois, where those companies were testing the performance of new hybrids. In December 2013, after collecting this evidence, U.S. marshals arrived at Mo's home in Boca Raton, Florida. He was taken into custody and extradited to Iowa, where he has been under house arrest in Des Moines ever since. The FBI also brought charges against five alleged co-conspirators, all Chinese, who remain at large, including the three men stopped by customs agents, and eventually against Mo's sister, Mo Yun, as well. Mo and his sister are scheduled to stand trial before a federal court in Iowa in September on charges of conspiracy to steal trade secrets. If convicted, they face up to ten years in prison and a $5 million fine. This may seem like a lot of post-September 11 cloak-and-dagger for a few corn seeds, but the U.S. government believes that something much larger is going on. This theft, they argue, stems from an undeniable and dangerous fact: Despite its remarkable landmass, China simply can't grow enough food to feed itself, particularly now that the country's burgeoning middle class has acquired an appetite for meat. (Most corn in China is used as feed for livestock.) Water shortages and lack of arable terrain have forced their government to buy between two and five million metric tons of American corn annually, approximately 94 percent of all corn imported into China each year. Daniel Acker / Bloomberg / Getty Luke Sharrett / Bloomberg / Getty If China hopes to feed (and pacify) its growing population while also loosening the very real stranglehold that America has on its national food supply, its farmers have to start producing a lot more corn-not just enough to meet their domestic demand in good years but enough to maintain a stockpile to offset their global market impact during bad ones. For decades, China has increased corn yields by putting more acres into production, but they're running out of arable land, and the USDA now estimates that Chinese corn consumption will rise by 41 percent by 2023, far outpacing production increases. The only tenable way for China to meet its own demand, then, is by planting high-performance hybrids, which can single-handedly double or potentially even triple per-acre corn production. Chinese scientists haven't developed a significant corn hybrid in years. But Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, the two American seed giants, have produced so many successful hybrids that they now control 45 percent of all the seed sold in the world. The Department of Justice maintains that China is quietly permitting and even encouraging companies to steal American agricultural secrets right out of the ground. Acquiring the technology behind these next-generation hybrids could save companies like DBN Group-and the country-as much as a decade, and many millions of dollars, in research. And, plant geneticists familiar with the case told me, the very fact that Kings Nower Seed has brought to market-and intended to bring more-products with stolen genetics hints that the Chinese government is complicit. The theft is not hard to detect or prove; the only way that DBN Group could hope to get away with this scheme is if China were pushing such spying as a matter of policy. In fact, a 2011 report prepared by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which advises the president on intelligence matters related to national security, listed “agricultural technology” among the targets “likely to be of greatest interest” to spies from Russia and China. “Surging prices for food," the report stated, “may increase the value of and interest in collecting U.S. technologies related to crop production, such as genetic engineering, improved seeds, and fertilizer." Since that report, the Department of Justice has cracked down, successfully prosecuting Chinese national Kexue Huang for stealing secrets related to organic fertilizer production and an unidentified “new food product” while he was employed at both Dow AgroSciences and Cargill, as well as Weiqiang Zhang, for theft of genetically engineered rice seeds from Colorado-based Ventria Bioscience. The federal government considers agricultural products both an asset and a weapon in a long-range geopolitical chess match with China. What makes the case against Mo Hailong stand out is that the FBI openly acknowledges that each step of its operation, each escalation of surveillance, was approved by a federal judge under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires that the investigating agency provide evidence that wiretapping is “necessary, or relevant, to the ability of the United States to protect against foreign threats to national security, such as attack, sabotage, terrorism, or clandestine intelligence activities." The federal government, thereby, has implicitly acknowledged that it considers agricultural products both an asset and a weapon in a long-range geopolitical chess match with China, a resource of near-military value and importance, one that must be protected by all available means. By that logic, those Chinese nationals stealing corn are spies, no different-and, indeed, perhaps more important-than those who swipe plans for a new weapons system. This may, at first glance, appear melodramatic-like Homeland in the heartland-but it is striking that the Department of Justice did not invoke FISA measures (at least not openly) in carrying out similar investigations into Dongfan Chung, a former Boeing engineer who stole trade secrets related to the Delta IV rocket and the Air Force's C- 17 aircraft, or Qing Li, who conspired to procure 30 military accelerometers, which, according to the government, “have applications in smart bombs, missiles, and calibrating g-forces of nuclear explosions." When asked about the extraordinary use of FISA in this case, Nick Klinefeldt, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, who is prosecuting Mo, chose his words carefully. “The agriculture industry is important," he said. “It's important not just to the state of Iowa but to the United States." In announcing the charges against Mo last July, Thomas R. Metz, special agent in charge of the Omaha Division of the FBI, went still further, saying that “identifying and deterring those focused on stealing trade secrets, propriety [sic] and confidential information, or national security information is the number two priority for the FBI, second only to terrorism." Think about that: The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI now contend, in effect, that the theft of genetically modified corn technology is as credible a threat to national security as the spread to nation-states of the technology necessary to deliver and detonate nuclear warheads. Disturbingly, they may be right. As the global population continues to climb and climate change makes arable soil and water for irrigation ever more scarce, the world's next superpower will be determined not just by which country has the most military might but also, and more importantly, by its mastery of the technology required to produce large quantities of food. The bureau's investigation of Mo Hailong began only after Mo made a stunning blunder. It was early May 2011, and Mo and Wang Lei, vice chairman of Kings Nower Seed at the time, were driving country roads in Tama County, Iowa, allegedly searching for a DuPont Pioneer test field. But apparently uncertain if he was in the right place or unsure of what kind of seed DuPont Pioneer was testing, Mo had Wang pull to the edge of a field, so they could question a farmer in the midst of spring planting. Mo and Wang told the farmer they had been attending an international agricultural conference at Iowa State and wanted to see someone planting a real cornfield. The farmer was dubious. Ames was nearly an hour away with nothing but expanses of cornfields in between, all at the peak of planting season. How had these two men chanced upon his field on the very day that he happened to be planting an experimental and top-secret seed under development by DuPont Pioneer? The next day, a DuPont Pioneer field manager spotted the same car. He watched Mo scramble up the ditch bank, and then kneel down in the dirt and begin digging corn seeds out of the ground. When confronted by the field manager, Mo grew flustered and red-faced. He now claimed to be a researcher from the University of Iowa-not Iowa State-on his way to a conference. But before the field manager could question him further, Mo fled. He jumped into the waiting car, and Wang took off, swerving through the grassy ditch before fishtailing onto the gravel road and speeding away. Mary Anne Andrei The genetic profile of the blue DuPont Pioneer inbred corn seed, one variety stolen by Mo Hailong in Tama, Iowa, is a closely guarded secret. Farmers planting them are forbidden from keeping the seeds or collecting kernels from the ears they produce, and must sign nondisclosure forms covering the details of their company-mandated planting plans. A few weeks later, agents from the Iowa office of the FBI sat down with DuPont Pioneer representatives for a standing meeting (which itself says something about the importance our law enforcement officials place on our corn) at their corporate headquarters in Johnston, Iowa, a northern suburb of Des Moines. A DuPont Pioneer executive mentioned the incident and explained that the company enters into exclusive contracts with farmers to grow proprietary and often genetically engineered seeds. The exact genetic sequence of successful seeds is a tightly held secret, worth many millions of dollars. The DuPont Pioneer field manager had written down the license plate number and handed it over to company security. Multinational food conglomerates like DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto have sizable security forces and highly efficient investigatory networks. They traced the plates back to a rental car company at the Kansas City airport. Representatives there said the car had been rented by Mo Hailong. According to court documents, an unnamed vice president and general manager from DuPont Pioneer's Chinese subsidiary told the FBI he already had reason to believe that Kings Nower Seed was somehow stealing the company's experimental seeds in order to raise clones for sale to Chinese farmers. DuPont Pioneer had recently discovered that one of DBN Group's best-selling corn seed products in China shared genetic sequencing with a male parent line that the company had genetically engineered. The executive had confronted a DBN Group executive, sarcastically congratulating him on the success of their product. The Chinese executive had allegedly cracked a knowing smile and nodded, which the DuPont executive had taken as a tacit admission. The FBI agreed to investigate. Four months later, while the FBI was still looking into the Tama incident, a call came into the sheriff's office in Polk County, Iowa, with a report of three Asian males walking around a cornfield in Bondurant, just outside of Des Moines. Despite the strangeness of such a call, the responding deputy hurried to the field, approached the men, and took down their names: Mo Hailong Robert (Mo occasionally used the alias Robert Mo), Wang Lei, and Li Shaoming, the CEO of Kings Nower Seed. The men acknowledged that they were Chinese seed growers but claimed they were there to offer advice to the owner of the farm. When the FBI learned of the report-and recognized Mo's name-they dispatched an agent from the Omaha field office to interview the farmer. He had never heard of the three men, much less sought their advice. He told the agent he didn't even know what kind of corn he was growing, other than to say he was under contract to Monsanto. Soon after, a Monsanto field representative confirmed that this, too, was a test site for a new parent seed the company had under development. With an emerging picture of what Mo was up to, the FBI began tracking his movements-and soon discovered that he and Wang were intending to travel together to Des Moines for events held in connection with the World Food Prize. The morning after their arrival, on February 15, 2012, the security team at DuPont Pioneer called the FBI to report “they were confident” (in the words of the subsequent report) that Mo, using an alias and fake corporate affiliation, had joined a delegation visiting their headquarters. The FBI collected the surveillance video of the tour inside DuPont Pioneer's research lab and also identified Mo on corresponding security footage from the delegation's tour of a Monsanto research facility in Ankeny later in the day. That night, agents tracked Mo to a state dinner hosted by Iowa Governor Terry Branstad in honor of Xi Jinping, then the vice president of China and now the president. The next day, Mo and Wang went together to a sports bar near the hotel where they were staying in the Des Moines suburbs. They met up with Xaoming Bao, a Chinese seed executive and former DuPont Pioneer employee whose wife was employed by the company as a corn-genetics researcher. FBI investigators could now demonstrate that Mo had, on two separate occasions, sought to obtain experimental seeds by collecting them from secret test sites, and furthermore, it appeared he had gained the information about how to find those locations by working with corporate insiders. The FBI also discovered that while he was in Iowa, Mo had shipped hundreds of pounds of packages from a West Des Moines UPS location to his home in Boca Raton. The contents listed on the tracking sheet: “corn samples ." Mary Anne Andrei Drought-resistant corn hybrids on display at a DuPont Pioneer sales center near Cairo, Nebraska. The theft of high-performing corn seeds from a competitor's fields is as old as the cultivation of corn. “They say that a good plant breeder always had lots of pockets," said Donald J. Lee, a professor and plant geneticist in the department of agronomy and horticulture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “And when he would go visit his neighbor's plant breeding fields, they always came back full." Until recently, farmers were their own seed providers. Lee told me his grandfather, a farmer in Iowa a century ago, would select ears from each harvest to provide the seed for planting the next year. He recorded the quality of his yield, slowly identifying a set of seed characteristics that seemed to produce the best crop. In those days, it was not unusual for family and friends to share seed stock. “Maybe a neighbor would say, 'Hey, I really did good with this seed that I got from a cousin in eastern Iowa. You should try a little of this,'" Lee said. “But they were all open-pollinated populations, so those seeds were not genetically identical. In fact, probably every seed was genetically distinct ." So much genetic variability meant that farmers like Lee's grandfather would cross two varieties and get large, robust ears one year, only to find that the same two varieties produced scraggly cobs with missing kernels and dead tips the next. “So if you take a look at the historic yields of corn in Iowa and Nebraska during the teens, the twenties, the thirties-it's flat," he said. That all changed with the arrival of Henry A. Wallace, the founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred Seeds, who Lee described as “the Bill Gates of the seed industry." Wallace, the son of the longtime president of the Cornbelt Meat Producers, first encountered the problem of genetic variation while studying corn breeding at Iowa State Agricultural College. Rediscovering Gregor Mendel's groundbreaking research on pea pods, Wallace had the key insight that the only solution to producing hearty corn hybrids was to first create genetically pure inbred varieties that could be used as “parents” year after year. Wallace initially worried that such an approach “was probably impractical because of the difficulty of doing the hand-pollinating work," but he was won over by a paper published in 1918 by Donald Jones, a chemist at the Connecticut Agricultural Station's experimental farm. Jones had successfully inbred two separate varieties of corn and then crossed them to produce a durable, high-performing hybrid. Wallace recognized that this was the key to creating seed corn with consistently higher yields, but the old problem remained: Producing these hybrids would be far too complex for the average farmer to undertake alone. Wallace began to envision an organized way of breeding and distributing high-performing corn seed to farmers across the Midwest. A man of unusual commitment to the common good, he wrote a friend that he did not consider himself a corn breeder but rather “a searcher for methods of bringing the 'inner light' to outward manifestation." So Wallace at first conceived of a nonprofit organization, potentially run with government cooperation and even public funding. In 1921, his father, Henry C. Wallace, was appointed secretary of agriculture and might have helped spearhead such an effort. But after his father died unexpectedly at age 58 and Calvin Coolidge settled into the laissez-faire years of his presidency, Wallace saw little chance of an ambitious national program gaining traction. He decided instead, in May 1926, to start the Hi-Bred Corn Company-the world's first hybrid seed producer. To interest farmers, Roswell Garst, Wallace's lead salesman, who later became a major seed producer in his own right, went from one farm to the next, across 16 counties in western Iowa, giving away enough eight-pound sample bags of Hi-Bred seeds for farmers to plant half their fields. Whatever additional yield the hybrid corn produced, Pioneer would split fifty-fifty with the farmer. After several years, farmers realized that they would see greater profits by simply buying the bags of seeds, instead of sharing the surplus yield with the company. Those shared harvests produced something even more valuable than profit for the young company: information about how the seeds performed under different growing conditions. Wallace directed a sizable chunk of his revenue back into research, hiring a team of new corn breeders to devise still more hybrids. In the early 1930s, Perry Collins, one of Wallace's researchers, developed Hybrid 307-the first corn specifically developed and marketed for drought-resistance, hitting seed dealerships just as the country spiraled into the Dust Bowl. And when Wallace was, like his father, appointed secretary of agriculture, by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, he finally had the resources to nationally evangelize for hybrid seed, which he believed had the potential to rescue the nation from the Great Depression. The transformation that followed was staggering. When Wallace joined Roosevelt's cabinet, less than 1 percent of America's corn came from hybrid seeds. A decade later, more than three-quarters of all corn was grown from hybrids-nearly doubling the national per-acre yield over the next 20 years. To keep this record output from depressing corn prices, Wallace created the “ever-normal granary," under which the federal government would establish a federal grain reserve. In years of high production, the Department of Agriculture would buy corn and store it to keep prices up. In years of crop loss, the government would release the reserve to keep prices down. Wallace's plan was hugely popular, stabilizing American food prices-and winning him a spot as FDR's running mate in 1940. But Wallace's remarkable Hi-Bred Corn had one significant drawback: It consumed far more nitrogen compounds from the soil than ordinary corn-more, in fact, than almost any other crop. During the war years, the government solved the problem by simply putting more acres into production, but after World War II, the Department of Agriculture found a different solution. Giant chemical manufacturers, like DuPont and Monsanto, had secured wartime defense contracts to produce ammonia nitrate and anhydrous ammonia to make bombs and other munitions. They had developed an herbicide known as 2,4-D as a potential destroyer of German crops and manufactured the insecticide DDT to prevent the spread of typhus-carrying lice among GIs. As soon as the war was over, DuPont turned to marketing those same chemicals for lawn and garden use as fertilizer, weed killer, and DuPont 5% DDT Insect Spray. Company advertisements from the period touted their products as “Better Things for Better Living … Through Chemistry." But gardens were just the tip of the iceberg. DuPont, along with other giant chemical manufacturers like Dow and Monsanto, teamed up with the grain cartels, including Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, to lobby for congressional support for producing these compounds as large-scale agri-chemicals. In 1953, the industry found its greatest ally, when Ezra Taft Benson took over as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture. (Wallace, by then, had retired from public life. He was briefly the editor of the New Republic before making a failed bid for the presidency in 1948.) Benson, a high-ranking member of the Mormon Church and a fanatical Red Scare Republican, immediately informed Eisenhower that he was philosophically opposed to the government price supports developed by Wallace, because, to his mind, they were tantamount to socialism. He publicly referred to small farmers as “irresponsible feeders at the public trough." Foreshadowing today's aggressive, pro-corporate agricultural policies, Benson argued that the only way to outcompete the collective farms of the Soviet Union and Red China was to use our superior corn and chemical technology to the fullest. The United States could, if it chose, overproduce corn to drive down international prices, and it could use the surplus as a tool of diplomatic leverage in the form of foreign aid. Instead of guns, the United States began to give our allies grain-transforming, for the first time, a food product into a weapon in the national arsenal. The only problem was that by effectively militarizing American agriculture, Benson made agri-tech a target for foreign spying. In April 2012, Mo flew from his home in Florida to O'Hare International Airport and rented a car. An FBI surveillance team followed him as he drove along back roads through rural Illinois and northern Indiana. After about a week of this, Mo stopped one day at a farm near Monee, Illinois, advertising DuPont Pioneer seeds for sale. The farmer there later told the FBI that Mo had asked about what types of corn and soybeans he could buy, explaining that he had purchased 40 acres nearby and was planning to plant the property. The surveillance team followed Mo to a farm about 15 minutes west of Monee, where, a review of property records soon revealed, Kings Nower Seed had purchased a parcel for $600,000 only the month before. As agents watched Mo crisscross the Midwest, stopping at seed stores to inquire about different products, they began to suspect that he planned to plant the Illinois acreage by hand. Donald J. Lee, the University of Nebraska professor, compares stealing parent seeds to obtaining programming code without knowing what application it is intended for or what operating system it's meant to run on. Likewise, knowing the genetic structure of a corn seed is just one part of the problem. “You don't know the importance of those genes, unless you have yield data," said Lee. “When did the plant mature? What's its development profile? How did it respond to such-and-such disease?" This is what Mo appeared to be doing: setting up his own covert test farm, one that he could oversee personally. --advertisement -- FBI surveillance teams followed Mo to Crossroads Ag, a DuPont Pioneer seed dealer in Dallas Center, Iowa, and observed him loading bags of seeds into his trunk. When investigators questioned the owner, he said Mo paid in cash-more than $1,500-for six bags of Pioneer Hi-Bred corn seeds. He said Mo had been purchasing seed there for two years, always asking for DuPont Pioneer's “latest products," but this year he had arrived with a detailed list. The owner had told Mo that he wasn't supposed to sell him some of the specific products he was asking for, unless he had a contract agreement with DuPont Pioneer, which the owner knew he didn't. The next day, FBI surveillance watched Mo repeat the process, buying six bags of DeKalb brand seed corn, a Monsanto product, at MFA Agri Services in Pattonsburg, Missouri. Finally, the team followed Mo back to Adel, Iowa, where Mo unloaded some of the seed bags at a storage facility before driving on to the farm in Illinois where the remaining bags were unloaded and, the FBI believes, seeds may have been planted. About one out of every 200 seeds in a bag of hybrid corn seed is a parent, which can be identified by planting the bag and then collecting kernels from whichever plants look different from the rest. Investigators believe Mo may have been collecting some parent seeds this way. Later, when Mo and two DBN Group employees attempted to FedEx the remaining corn seeds to an associate in Hong Kong, the FBI intercepted the packages and conducted a search of the five boxes. Each contained eight or nine gallon-sized baggies filled with seed corn, along with a handwritten numerical code identifying each hybrid. The FBI has not revealed exactly when they applied to a FISA court for more broad-ranging investigatory powers, but the FBI's court filings show that their information on Mo and his associates became much more detailed after meetings with DuPont Pioneer executives over the summer. Top executives told agents that “the loss of an inbred line of seed would result in losing approximately five to eight years of research and a minimum of $30 to $40 million dollars, potentially much more." After that, the FBI tapped the men's mobile phones and tracked Mo's bank records. They collected their email from Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail, corporate documents from DropBox, and thousands of files from Mo's Apple iCloud account. The FBI used Mo's mobile phone to track his movements, bugged his rental cars to eavesdrop on his conversations, and installed a video camera outside the storage unit in Adel. To exercise such investigatory power, the FBI had to argue that Mo was an “agent of a foreign power”-or, in other words, to persuade a judge that Mo might be acting on behalf not just of DBN Group but at the direction of the People's Republic of China. With that, the FBI had the authority to treat Mo as if he were the leader of a state-sponsored Chinese spy ring. (Klinefeldt, the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, was evasive about whether that suspicion proved substantive. “When you start an investigation," he said, “you don't know exactly where it will lead.") The theft of high-performing corn seeds from a competitor's fields is as old as the cultivation of corn. FBI investigators soon got the explicit evidence they needed to make arrests. Over a listening device installed in an Enterprise rental car, the surveillance team recorded a bizarre and inept conversation between two of Mo's associates from DBN Group, Lin Yong and Ye Jian. In the translated transcript, submitted as part of the government's case, the two men are consumed by worry that they are being followed and about the charges they could face if caught. So, as they drive around rural Illinois looking for DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto test fields from which to steal, they begin making a list of the crimes they have committed. After some back and forth, they come up with trespassing for every time they have slipped onto private property, larceny for the seeds and ears they have been stealing from the fields, and multiple violations of intellectual property protections. “These are actually very serious offenses," Lin says. “They could treat us as spies !" Ye interjects. Lin, exasperated, responds: “That is what we've been doing !" Soon after, with the harvest season nearly complete, Mo seems to have decided it was time to send to China what corn he and his associates had collected. The group drove back to the secret Illinois farm and began discussing how they would divvy up the seeds. Some would go into checked bags bound for Beijing, others would be carried to a car and driven across the border from Vermont into Canada, and some would go with Mo back to Florida, where he would ship them to China. With tickets booked for departure the following morning, the five men readied their caches of seeds-Li deciding to stash his under packets of Pop Weaver microwave popcorn. The whole group then piled into a white minivan and drove into Monee to eat at the local Subway. On their way out, one of the men, perhaps Ye, must have stuffed his pockets full of napkins. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States at President Eisenhower's invitation in 1959, he specifically requested to see only one man: Roswell Garst, the former Pioneer seed salesman for Henry A. Wallace, who was then head of Garst and Thomas Hi-Bred Corn Company. Khrushchev had met Garst once before, when he visited the Soviet Union, and had become obsessed by the potential of hybrid corn. Khrushchev and his wife spent a day at Garst's farm near Coon Rapids, Iowa. In his memoirs, Khrushchev later wrote, “Garst gave me an entire lecture on agriculture," in which he earnestly explained that American farmers had stopped worrying about crop rotation. “Science today considers that approach outdated. And I think so, too," Garst told the Soviet leader. In past years, planting the same crop repeatedly would have attracted pests and depleted the soil of nitrogen. “Now there is no such problem. We have herbicides and other such chemical substances that make it possible to combat pests," Garst said. And there was no longer any need to plant clover or alfalfa to accumulate nitrogen. “It is more profitable for me to buy nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, in mix form, and add this fertilizer ." On that same official visit, Ezra Taft Benson led Khrushchev on a tour of the U.S. Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland. Benson, in his official remarks, said that there was a “constant give-and-take of information between government scientists and those in private industry," adding that “we are all working together within the framework of our capitalistic free-enterprise society to benefit our farmers, all our citizens, and people throughout the world." He listed hybrid corn first among the achievements of such cooperative efforts and introduced white-coated lab researchers who extolled the virtues of 2,4-D and chemical fertilizers. Khrushchev was unimpressed by a visit he made to a farm owned by President Eisenhower, dismissing it as “not on a scale such as we have at our collective farms and state farms." Benson later remembered that Khrushchev bragged, “We won't have to fight you. We'll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands." Benson vowed that American farms would outproduce the Soviets through superior chemistry. By the end of the Eisenhower era, however, environmentalists began to raise concerns about the hundreds of commercial herbicides and pesticides being applied to American crops in quantities totaling hundreds of millions of pounds. Benson admonished doubters that “abandoning the use of chemicals on farms and in the food industry would result in an immediate decline in the quantity and overall quality of our food supply and cause a rapid rise in food prices paid by the consumer." Even when Rachel Carson documented connections between DDT and 2,4-D and elevated incidence rates of rare forms of cancer in Silent Spring, Benson remained unmoved. He is said to have written to Eisenhower wondering “why a spinster with no children was so concerned with genetics," and then, as if to answer his own question, offered that Carson was “probably a Communist." (The Eisenhower Presidential Library, for what it's worth, contains no record of this letter.) Henry A. Wallace's scientific breakthroughs with cross-breeding corn varieties revolutionized agriculture in the United States. Wallace, at bottom, was an idealist who believed hybridized corn would feed the world. Benson's war on the “socialist” price supports and farm aid programs instituted by Henry A. Wallace stalled out during the liberal-minded 1960s. But at the advent of the new decade, President Richard Nixon appointed Earl Butz, Benson's former assistant, to become the new secretary of agriculture. Butz had grown up on a farm in Indiana and spent 30 years teaching agricultural economics at Purdue before becoming dean of the university's College of Agriculture. Many small farmers hated him, because he had been such a vocal advocate for turning family farming into big business during the Eisenhower administration. His refrain for those families, famously, was: “Get big or get out ." Almost as soon as Butz won approval from Congress, he canceled payments for fallow land and urged farmers to “plant fencerow to fencerow," promising to use the emerging global economy to buttress against low prices. If our supply threatened futures, we would simply go to the world market and use our size and economic might to meet the demand and forge foreign dependence on American food in the bargain. We would defeat the Communists by making them dependent on us to feed themselves. In January 1972, Butz sold what amounted to our entire grain reserve to the Soviets. The following month, Nixon went to China and brokered a deal with Chairman Mao Zedong, allowing the importation of American corn and securing contracts for American companies to build 13 of the world's largest ammonia-processing plants for producing fertilizer on Chinese soil. America's Communist foes regarded these moves as an agreement not to wage war through food. But Butz discussed these moves in terms of “agri-power," and stated it plainly: “Food is a weapon." To open a new front in the conflict, he supported maintaining American food superiority through yet another innovation: bioengineering feed, such as corn and soybeans. Through the miracle of science, the United States would not only produce more crops than our rivals; we would produce better crops. By 1972, scientists had already developed the ability to cut and splice protein strands in the DNA sequences of bacteria. If they could do the same with plant cells, then they could chemically insert resistance to weeds and insects. Less than five years later, a team from the University of Washington discovered that a bacterium that causes tumorlike growths on plants did so by inserting its own DNA into the cell nuclei of its host plant. What they had discovered was essentially a natural form of gene splicing. By the 1980s, researchers had devised techniques for removing the bacteria genes and inserting desirable DNA sequences. The U.S. government recognized this as technology the Soviets and Chinese could not match. Monsanto was also quick to see the market opportunity. The company had grown with the production of 2,4-D and its descendant 2,4,5-T, which were then combined to produce Agent Orange to defoliate forest cover during the Vietnam War. In 1970, in an effort to come up with an even stronger plant killer, Monsanto chemist John E. Franz hit upon an herbicide called glyphosate, which was marketed under the trade name Roundup and had seen unmatched growth in broadleaf weed control in the agricultural industry. The only problem with Roundup: It was such an effective herbicide that farmers had to apply it carefully, spraying only early sprouting weeds, to avoid exterminating their crops. Monsanto's engineers set about searching for a gene that would allow crops to survive exposure to Roundup. They found it in the wastewater-treatment plant of one of their own glyphosate production plants in Louisiana, where workers had noticed a range of bacteria thriving despite exposure to Roundup-and one, under lab testing, displayed total immunity to glyphosate pesticides. By 1996, Monsanto had commercially introduced soybeans that had been genetically modified to resist glyphosate-what the company termed “Roundup Ready." Next, researchers set to trying to find a genetic-engineering solution to the European corn borer, an insect that inflicted more than $1 billion in losses of corn production in the U.S. and Canada each year. Since the 1960s, endotoxins produced by Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a common bacteria found in the soil, had been sold as a commercial microbial insecticide to kill moth larvae. If the specific DNA that produced Bt toxins could be isolated and spliced into corn genetic sequences, scientists believed they could create an ear of corn that would be lethal to the European corn borer. Soon, that hurdle had been cleared, and Monsanto began looking for a seed partner to market its pest-resistant corn. If it could marry its genetic modifications with Pioneer's hybrid seeds, Monsanto believed it would have a corn seed with unmatched yield potential. In the early 1990s, perhaps too eager to demonstrate the effectiveness of its new GMO crops, Monsanto allowed Pioneer to use its biotech to produce Roundup Ready soybeans and Bt corn-asking only for small usage fees and no royalties. For less than $40 million, Pioneer suddenly had the technology and the sales muscle to move toward genetically modified feed crops, a growth market worth many billions of dollars. Rather than partner with Monsanto, Pioneer became its greatest competitor, entering into a joint venture with DuPont, called Optimum Quality Grains. In response, Monsanto launched a series of bitter and protracted lawsuits, and eventually, in 1999, Pioneer sold its entire remaining stock to DuPont (thus changing the name to DuPont Pioneer). In 2002, all eleven lawsuits were settled at once-as DuPont Pioneer realized that it had more to gain by paying for Monsanto's genetics and focusing on capturing the Chinese market. In the years since, DuPont Pioneer has increased its share of the corn-seed market in China from less than a tenth of a percent to 12 percent. (Monsanto has a 1 percent market share.) DuPont Pioneer has told Chinese officials that they should Americanize their agriculture: consolidate land, plant GMO seed, apply industrial fertilizers, subsidize the sale of planting and harvest equipment. This way, the company argues, China could dramatically increase its per-acre yield. William S. Niebur, who leads DuPont Pioneer's operations in China, told the Des Moines Register last year that officials have listened to these recommendations with an “open ear ." In March 2015, Mo Hailong's attorneys filed a motion to suppress all evidence gathered from the secret recordings made of Mo and his associates, arguing that the authorization to gather those materials should never have been granted. In order to legally justify the use of FISA, surveillance must target an “agent of a foreign power," and the purpose of the surveillance must be to gather “foreign intelligence information." Mo's attorneys argue there is no evidence that Mo is an agent of the Chinese government or that his company is backed by China, so for “the first time in the statute's history (as far as our research reveals), the [U.S.] government used FISA to investigate a trade secret dispute between two privately owned companies ." When it comes to the Chinese form of capitalism, the line is undeniably murky. The government has taken a strong hand in recent years in encouraging the growth of China's agricultural sector. In 2013, for example, China's Shuanghui International entered an overvalue bid to buy Smithfield Foods, the world's largest producer of pork. Under questioning by Congress, Smithfield insisted the purchase came without the urging or backing of the Chinese government. But after the purchase received congressional approval, Nathan Halverson at the Center for Investigative Reporting discovered that the Bank of China, the state bank of the Chinese government, had approved the $4 billion loan for Shuanghui to purchase Smithfield in a single day-and in China, Shuanghui has touted the support the government is giving them. In the wake of that purchase, the Chinese government has been actively consolidating the country's seed companies, which currently number more than 5,000. This consolidation would centralize research, improving China's ability to develop its own hybrids to compete with giants like DuPont and Monsanto, and it would also allow China to mimic the field-to-slaughter vertical integration that has given meat producers like Smithfield and Cargill such an advantage in the United States. DBN Group is a notable example of a seed company that is booming thanks to consolidation and government assistance. Founded in 1994 by seed-tech whiz kid Shao Genhuo, DBN Group has recently acquired more than 30 feed operations from the Chinese government, and the company runs China Farmer University jointly with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. By targeting Mo and his sister Mo Yun as the leaders of the spy ring, the FBI may hope to incriminate Shao (who is married to Mo Yun)-and, ultimately, implicate Chinese agriculture ministers. But the U.S. government's argument that the technology behind Roundup Ready soybeans and Bt corn constitutes not just trade secrets but national security secrets is a problematic one. Companies like DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto like to maintain that they are striving only to feed a burgeoning global population. Last year, Niebur, of DuPont Pioneer China, asked, “Without China's food security, how can we ever imagine an effective, realistic, sustainable global food-security system?" But DuPont Pioneer's goal, of course, is not global food security or feeding the Chinese people, but rather increasing market share and profit by keeping China as a customer. And the Department of Justice has taken up the argument that such a goal is not only of importance to our economy but a matter of national security, an unsettling conflation of the interests of large corporations with that of the country itself. Today, it's estimated that 92 percent of American corn and 94 percent of American soybeans are GMOs, almost all of it produced by Monsanto or DuPont Pioneer, and again, nearly half of the seed sold globally. Activists in both China and the United States have raised concerns about just two corporations having so much influence over the world food supply, with so little transparency. (Despite repeated requests, DuPont Pioneer declined to participate in this story.) But these fears, while well founded, miss the larger point of what such companies represent: the intent of the U.S. government to use food as an ever-more powerful point of leverage to wield over large, increasingly hungry nations like China. The prosecution of Mo Hailong and his circle stands as a warning to the Chinese government, issued through its proxy companies. The ears in the field, the seeds in the ground, even the pollen on the wind, are American-owned and American-protected. They are available to the world as food only if you agree to our conditions and are willing to pay our price. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122441/corn-wars
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[Taiwan, China] Only three phone calls are needed to grow rice-direct attack on Taiwan's rice farmingMany people say that farmers eat every day, but apart from God, farmers are most afraid of offending one kind of people. This person can decide who should harvest first and dry the rice into the valley first and then arrive. Even farmers have control over whether the rice this season is delicious or not. Typhoon days are their most popular moments. Farmers will bring lunch, beer and Baolida to visit. Even if it takes two hours in the middle of the night, it will blow and rain at 3 o'clock, there can be no complaint whatsoever. Which person has such great ability? The answer is "substitute cultivator". Looking for substitute farming, interpersonal relationship is the key the literal meaning of "substitute farming" is "to replace other people's farming". Although many people will go to the countryside to transplant rice seedlings, cut rice, and dry rice, this is not the norm in rural areas. As early as 3 or 40 years ago, Taiwan introduced rice transplanters, Harvesters, grain drying machines, etc., make rice planting more efficient, and those who specialize in operating these machines to make a living are called substitute farmers. Many people often laugh and say that now rice planting can be easily and easily put into the bag by making three phone calls, one for land preparation, one for rice transplanting, and finally another for harvesting. However, the actual situation is of course not so simple. Although there are fixed farmers in each region, the farmers said that when a typhoon rushes, which field to harvest and bake first is not only based on the location, but also very important. Therefore, the following dialogue often occurs: "Please, I have known your uncle for so long, so help Joe." Sometimes, even the dead elders moved out: "My abba did it for you when he was alive. It's been so long. Please help me." typhoon days never sleeps although the final power of life and death is still in the hands of the farmers, sometimes they will be defeated by "Lu" Gong. At the beginning of July this year, Santai forced Taiwan to harvest the first rice harvest in Yilan. Farmers used life-threatening serial buckles to "coerce" the operators to cut until 2 or 3 o'clock in the middle of the night, and the sun rose the next day to continue working. This is also an important time for voters to serve. The powerful village chief will dispatch harvesters overnight and personally take charge of the rice cutting site. The whole countryside is like a city that never sleeps. The baking plant on a typhoon day is another battlefield. Wu Shaowen, a farmer who helped in the grain baking farm, pointed to the bottom floor of the three-story refrigerator and said that farmers knocked at the door early in the morning and each hand had a can of Poly Da. "The bottom floor of this refrigerator is full." The harvested rice is full of water and must be dried within 24 hours. When the harvest was rushed this year, the Yilan Farmers Association and the grain-drying farm were lined up with large trucks carrying rice. Some surrogate farmers said half-jokingly that the farmers just didn't kneel down, please. In addition to four two-story grain drying machines and stacking machines, Li Hanshi's grain drying factory in Yuanshan, Yilan, also has a 30% recliner beside bags of yellow millet. He was too busy to sleep during the typhoon. The recliner was his best friend. "Millet is New Taiwan Dollars. Everyone has to grab it and can't do it at all." Then how can we refuse the farmer's request cruelly? "I still have to say it, otherwise I will be exhausted. A person's ability is limited." harvest and prepare lunch, the tacit understanding of the countryside must be observed. Li Hanshi has been engaged in substitute farming for more than 30 years. He is one of the few "one-stop" substitute farmers. He takes care of seedlings, fields, grain baking and rice milling. He only has no harvester. Like other substitute farmers, he also rents 20 A farmland to grow rice. In Yilan, about 700 yuan usually needs to be beaten twice, once rough and once fine. The quality of the technology affects the farmers' harvest in one season. If the beating is uneven and the field is flooded unevenly, they will have to face the nightmare of weeds. Li Hanji said that he hates stones most when hitting fields. In addition to being easy to hit, serious cases may also hurt machines and tools, "but I can't hit fields without me." after farming, the price of rice seedlings is also 700 yuan. Many nursery farms also work as rice seedlings. Harvesting is 1100 yuan. The price of baked grain can be divided into dry grain and wet grain. Take Li Han period as an example, the price per kilogram of dry grain is 2 yuan. These are the figures on the book, and the private eyebrow corners are the interesting places in the countryside. For example, it is the basic common sense of farmers to prepare lunch and drinks for the farmers during harvest. Whether to eat or not is another matter. If you are not prepared, you will be regarded as "impolite"; in addition, if you do not drain the water during harvest, the harvesters may not say it, and their impression of the farmer may be compromised, because this will shorten the life of the harvester. When baking rice, they are most afraid of uneven ripening degree or too small quantity. Generally, the humidity of rice is about 25 degrees, which takes more than 20 hours to dry, and it is reduced to about 13 degrees. The firepower is too strong, the rice is easy to break, too weak, and the operation time is prolonged. It depends on experience. If the ripening degree of rice is uneven, the quality of baking will also be reduced. If the quantity is not enough at one time, the machine may not be detected, it depends on human judgment. Lack of manpower, small and medium-sized baking field gradually decline an iron oxen cart costs more than 200 million yuan and harvesters are 4 million, which is simply unaffordable for small farmers with fragmentary arable land. It can be said that behind every small farmer, there is a strong substitute farmer. Many large harvesters, in addition to substitute farming in the original area, will follow the rice maturity season and harvest all the way north for five 3. days. Li Hanji belongs to small and medium-sized contract tillers and only assists neighboring areas. He can bake about 30 tons of rice a day, which is one tenth of that of large factories. However, businesses of his size have gradually declined in recent years. He said with emotion that there used to be more than a dozen small and medium-sized grain baking plants in the neighboring areas, but with the development of large-scale machinery, the amount of grain entering the valley at one time increased, the grain baking plants needed to update their equipment, and many small and medium-sized old plants quit. However, what bothers him most is the labor problem. The work in the grain baking farm is heavy, no workers can be found, and the next generation is not willing to take it. His seedling farm is also not as good as large factories can invest in automatic conveying equipment, and it has to rely on manpower to carry it. The problem of lack of work is a vicious circle. He said bluntly that if he cannot do it one day, he may stop it directly. Source: BusinessWeek | Release Date: August 13, 2015 | Editor: Zhai Tianchang
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Problems of Agricultural Modernization in Taiwan (Part II)2 Agricultural development regulations can not construct the policy direction of agricultural modernization. Under the framework and guidance of the "Constitution", the "Agricultural Development Regulations" is the most important agricultural "law" in Taiwan. It can be said to be a "basic law of agriculture". The development goals revealed by it are related to the development of agricultural modernization. However, the legislative purpose of the "Agricultural Development Regulations" is limited to production and marketing, price and income, and agricultural land utilization, and fails to show the development direction and goals of the overall pattern. For example: "Article 1: in order to ensure the sustainable development of agriculture, in response to the internationalization and liberalization of agriculture, promote the rational use of agricultural land, adjust the structure of agricultural industry, stabilize agricultural production and marketing, enhance farmers' income and welfare, and improve farmers' living standards, these regulations are formulated; those not provided for in these regulations shall apply to the provisions of other laws." as for the multi-functionality of agriculture and the sustainable development of agriculture with economic, social and ecological aspects, it is so lacking that it is unable to show the goal of agricultural modernization and the policy direction of constructing agricultural modernization. Therefore, the agricultural development regulations should amend the general pattern of the "Basic Law of Agriculture". In addition to seeking the promotion of agricultural productivity and competitiveness and the increase of farmers' income, it is also necessary to improve the living environment and rest value of the countryside, give full play to the function of agriculture in the maintenance of the ecological environment and landscape, and take into account the goal of all-round agricultural modernization and the requirements of sustainable agricultural development. The "Agricultural Development Regulations" stipulate many provisions that are conducive to the development of agricultural modernization, such as improving the agricultural production environment, promoting the changes of agricultural structure, and enhancing agricultural competitiveness. However, some provisions on the use of agricultural land hinder agricultural development, in particular article 16, which relaxes the restrictions on the division of agricultural land, and article 18, which allows the construction of farmhouses on agricultural land. The 2.1 relaxation of restrictions on the division of agricultural land is contrary to the goal of improving the agricultural structure and leads to the loss of agricultural land resources. Although the relaxation of restrictions on the division of agricultural land will contribute to the independence of farmers' land property rights, the goal of "agricultural land use" and the improvement of agricultural structure will not be achieved. The reason for "agricultural land for agriculture" is very clear. If agricultural land for agricultural production is repeatedly divided and subdivided, and landowners are allowed to build farmhouses on agricultural land, many non-farmers who covet agricultural land for the benefit of building farmhouses will buy small-scale agricultural land in the name of farming and build houses. How will such agriculture be managed to promote agricultural modernization? How will agricultural productivity and competitiveness be improved? How will the well-being of farmers be ensured? Does the relaxation of restrictions on the division of agricultural land and the allowing of landowners to build farmhouses on agricultural land mean that the spirit of farming on agricultural land is no longer there? The administration of the Taiwan authorities and many major investments in agriculture, such as the implementation of the rezoning of agricultural land, the comprehensive planning plan for the use of agricultural land, the establishment of specialized agricultural areas and the promotion of the policy of "small landlords and large tenants", are all important objectives to expand the scale of farm operations, improve agricultural production conditions and promote changes in the agricultural structure. If, on the one hand, the policy relaxes or even cancels the restrictions on the division of agricultural land, on the other hand, it tries its best to strengthen the tenancy system and promote the circulation of agricultural land, carry out the redrawing of agricultural land, and promote the merger and concentration of land, so as to improve the agricultural structure, how will the contradiction between the waste of agricultural investment and agricultural administration be explained? It is no wonder that the effectiveness of the rezoning of agricultural land in Taiwan has been questioned. Since the rezoning of agricultural land is mainly aimed at improving the agricultural structure, the result of the rezoning should be able to expand the scale of farm operation and contribute to the development of agricultural mechanization and modernization. Moreover, due to the neat and square blocks, the improvement of agricultural waterways and irrigation facilities, the number of people jointly holding each land is reduced and the property right is clear, it is also more conducive to the promotion of agricultural land tenancy and the policy of "small landlords and large tenants. According to the results of the verification of the agricultural land rezoning project conducted by the "Council of Agriculture of the Executive Yuan" in 2009, comparing the cadastral map data before and after the rezoning of the agricultural land (Figure 3), the area and scale of the land before the rezoning are larger than those after the rezoning. In other words, as a result of the rezoning, the farmland has been fragmented, the scale of the farm has become smaller, the opportunities for agricultural mechanization have become less, and the possibility of agricultural modernization has become lower. Relaxing the restrictions on the division of agricultural land and allowing those who bear the agricultural land to build farmhouses on their own farmland will lead to the loss of agricultural land. In this way, the original vast farmland has disappeared, and the rural landscape of green fields has disappeared, replaced by houses. The excessive division of agricultural land not only makes it impossible to use large areas of agricultural land for production, but also achieves economies of scale. The fragmented agricultural land not only destroys the rural ecological environment, but also ugly rural landscape and style (Figure 4). The 2.2 of agricultural land to build farmhouses is contrary to the policy of agricultural land use, endangers the environment and landscape, and results in a waste of public investment. The main reason for allowing farmers to build houses on agricultural land is mainly because the non-urban land "rural areas" where farmers live have long been only delineated without planning and development. The original rural areas are old, declining, underdeveloped, and have not been planned as a whole, so there is insufficient land, lack of public facilities, and it is difficult to improve the living environment. Rural land is also shared by many children because of the equal division of inheritance. As a result of generations, land ownership is very complicated, making it very difficult to rebuild and build old houses. With the development of social economy, after the children of rural families grow up, they need to have spacious living space and living places to improve their lives. In the case of insufficient land construction and limited development space in rural areas, it is a last resort measure to allow farmers to build agricultural houses on their cultivated land. However, the construction of farmhouses on agricultural land, the problems of agricultural production environment and rural landscape will follow one after another; in the beautiful rural areas, in the name of Xingjin farmhouses, there are many "farmers" who operate "homestays". The destruction of the ecological environment and rural rest conditions is nothing more. The sporadic construction of farm houses on agricultural land not only leads to the loss of agricultural land resources, but also has an impact on the traditional rural landscape. The waste water and waste discharged from the farmhouses will cause water quality and soil pollution, and endanger the agricultural production environment. Not only can it not be improved, food safety and public health are also affected. Figure 4 Building of farmhouses on agricultural land, resulting in loss of agricultural land and deterioration of agricultural production environment note: From Taiwan's high-speed rail magazine "TLife" No. 47, November 2013. 3 Conclusion modern agriculture requires high-quality agricultural legislation, which is based on the law, establishes the direction of agricultural development, and serves as the basis for policy development and development strategy implementation. Therefore, agricultural legislation should be able to meet the requirements of the modernization of agricultural development, adjust and keep pace with the times. Taiwan's agriculture is a small-scale peasant economy, with small farm scale and limited competitiveness. In response to the needs of internationalization and trade liberalization, the impact and challenges encountered by agriculture are especially better than before. It is really appropriate to construct a set of all-round and modern development goals. And strategies to maintain and promote the sustainable development of agriculture. Today, while discussing the issue of land use and management, we are thinking about how to take care of farmers' lives and improve their well-being, but also to ensure the effective use of limited agricultural land resources, implement the policy of agricultural land use, and achieve the goal of agricultural modernization. To achieve this goal, we need to have comprehensive supporting measures and proper rural development planning, so that the construction code of farmhouses can be incorporated into the overall development of rural areas, so as to ensure the functions of agriculture and rural areas in production, life, ecology and leisure and recreation, and lay a good foundation for the modernization and sustainable development of agriculture. References Slightly source: Agricultural Vision | Author: Liu Jianzhe, Department of Leisure and Recreation Management, Asian University | Release Date: May 26, 2015 | Responsible Editor: Zhai Tianchang
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Overview of the British ApicultureKeywords : British bee industry; honey production; honey import and export; beeswax import and export from June 8 to 24, 2013, the author and his party visited the UK. During their stay in the UK, they investigated the market situation of British bee products in detail and got a preliminary understanding of the basic situation of the British bee industry. The development of the British bee industry is introduced as follows. Overall situation of apiculture in the UK in 1. Although there are no official statistics on the number of bee colonies and beeswax production in the UK, according to the author's understanding during the UK, there are 200000 colonies in the UK. Annual consumption of honey is at 25000 t. There are 40000 beekeepers in the UK, 30000 of whom have participated in the BeeBase scheme and registered. Since 2000-2011, the British honey production (Figure 1) has shown an overall upward trend, of which the honey production reached 8216t in 2009, the highest in 11 years. Honey production remained at 6300t in 2010 and 2011. The species of bees raised in the UK are mainly Western bees, of which Italian bees are the main ones. The main diseases of bees are virus diseases, chalk disease is less common, beehive beetles have occurred, no small bee mites. Bee American larval rancid disease is not common, once it occurs, it is usually treated by burning to control its epidemic. The production of bee industry in Britain is mainly to produce honey. The production season of honey is concentrated in April-September, of which may-August can be used for artificial insemination of the queen bee and breeding of the queen bee. Due to the cold British winter, there are usually only 3-4 frames left after the 10-frame bee overwinters. The number of bee colonies used for pollination in the UK is small, with about 20% of the colony used for pollination. British government involvement in beekeeping began in the 1940 s. At that time, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries rationed the supply of edible sugar during the Second World War and needed to develop beekeeping to replace the supply of sugar. The first legislation for beekeeping was the Larval Rot Disease Act of 1942. The current bee health regulation is the Bee Disease and Pest Control Order 2006. This decree covers possible outbreaks of pests and diseases such as larval rancid disease in the Americas, larval rancid disease in Europe, small beehive beetles and small bee mites. The decree also clarifies the important role of bees and bumblebees. Import and Export of British Honey in 2. Since 2000, the import of British honey has continued to increase, and the import volume has continued to increase (Table 1). The increase in imports is mainly due to the increase in the unit price of imports, which increased from US $1.05/kg in 2000 to US $3.54/kg in 2011. Since 2006-2011, the UK has become the world's third largest honey importer after Germany and the United States. In 2012, it became the fourth largest importer of honey after the United States, Germany and Japan. Table 2 British honey exports in 2000-2011 the UK accounts for only 2-8% of imports per year compared to 20000-30000 t per year. Since 2003, the export volume of honey has been increasing, and the export volume of honey has continued to increase. The unit price of exports continues to rise. In 2009, the export unit price reached $7.75/kg. Compared with the increase in import prices, the unit price of British honey exports has increased even more, and the price difference with the unit price of imports has continued to increase. 3. British Beeswax Import and Export beeswax is a secondary bee product in the British bee trade. Although the import and export volume is not large, the unit price is higher than honey. Due to the limited consumption market, the quantity of beeswax imported from Britain is relatively stable. Except for the beeswax imports exceeding 700t in 2002 and 2003, the beeswax imports in other years basically remained at 400-600t (Table 3). Before 2005, the import unit price of beeswax was basically stable at about US $4/kg. After 2005, it was basically stable at US $6-7/kg. The UK's beeswax imports remain at the top 5-10 levels in the world. Table 3 Import of beeswax in the UK from 2000 to 2011 source: FAO website although beeswax is imported every year, British beeswax is still exported to the international market, with 100-170t beeswax exported every year (Table 4). The export unit price is basically 6-8 USD/kg. In 2011, the export unit price of beeswax rose to $9.298/kg. Compared with imported beeswax, the unit price of exported beeswax is always higher than that of imported beeswax. In the beeswax export market, the UK is basically in the world 9-13 (from more to less). Table 4 British beeswax exports in 2000-2011 4. UK bee products market british bee products are mainly natural and pure as the selling point, many honey is clearly marked with the words "natural and pure", the packaging is very beautiful. Sales of bee products are mainly concentrated in supermarkets, health care stores and cosmetics stores. During the period in the UK, the author did not find a franchise shop for bee products. The biggest selling bee product in the UK is honey, with fewer product types such as propolis, bee pollen and royal jelly. The main varieties of honey are acacia honey, wild flower honey, forest honey, spring honey and summer honey. The highest selling price and the largest variety of products is Manuka honey from New Zealand. In the UK, New Zealand's Manuka honey is very popular, both in supermarkets and health care stores. It is often seen that Manuka honey produced by different manufacturers is sold at the same time. In Britain's famous Tesco supermarket, 454g of pure honey costs 1.76 pounds (1 pound is about 9.32 yuan, 2013. The Rowse Honey Company, established in 1938, registered 340g of pure honey under the Rowse brand for 2.72 pounds. The price of honey in health care stores is higher than in supermarkets. The price of honey in health care stores is generally 250g at 9.99 pounds. For example, 250g packages such as Thyme brand honey, Beech brand forest honey dew and organic forest honey collected from Zambian forest by Zambian Bee Company all cost 9.99 pounds. 250g of Manuka honey costs £ 16.99. There are also many health care shops in major cities in the UK that sell honey and bee products, and cosmetics and skin care products made from honey are also sold in cosmetics shops. Many bee companies produce cosmetics and skin care products such as hand creams. For example, the honey hand cream produced by Thewilt County Beekeepers is available in lavender, rose, orange and Honeybuckle4 types, and the 35g package costs 7.99 pounds. 100g of pollen costs £ 8.99. 100g of honey costs £ 8.99 and 250ml of orange-scented shower gel containing wild honey and olive oil costs £ 9. 75ml of hand oil from Mains & le sells for £ 7.25. Differences between 5. and China there are two differences between China and Britain in the bee industry: First, the British government attaches great importance to the beekeeping industry. As early as the 1940 s, the government was involved in the management of the beekeeping industry. In 1942, Britain enacted the first beekeeping legislation, the Larva Rancid Disease Act. In 1950, the State appointed the National Agricultural Advisory Service to be responsible for bee health. The British government is fully aware of the importance of bees and has always believed that the purpose of scientific research is to protect bees. Bees are essential pollinators of crops and wild plants and support for the bee industry are two of the main reasons for the UK government to protect bees. Second, the British bee products market, especially the skin care market is a very mature market. Skin care products are beautifully packaged, varied and well-made, and have a certain popularity and purchasing power among consumers. This is in stark contrast to the just start of the Chinese bee products skin care market. From the British bee products skin care market, the future of China's bee products skin care market will have great development potential and broad application prospects. Source: Agricultural Vision | Release Date: July 08, 2015 | Responsible Editor: Zhai Tianchang
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China's economic reforms burst the global salary bubble?Some commentators pointed out that while China is rising, workers and the middle class in OECD member countries are becoming more and more difficult. One of the main reasons for this trend is that China's open economy has impacted global labor market supply. Some economists have said with great interest that China's reform and opening up has "punctured the global salary bubble". For capital owners, this means that there are no more unions, no more overtime pay and pensions; at the same time, cheap labor and low-cost land have emerged, and regulatory costs have been reduced. This is not to say that the Chinese government is bent on weakening the middle class in rich countries; it means that China uses its vast territory and large population as a comparative advantage to accelerate economic development. This article has some reference significance. There is now a growing notion that Western-style capitalism is chaotic, harsh and unfair, while another model adopted by a rising China seems more attractive. There are two arguments in support of this argument. First, democratic institutions do not apply to all countries. Compare India and China, which system has lifted 0.5 billion people out of poverty over the past 20 years? Not to mention the Middle East. Another argument is that the West has made a key mistake: overestimating the efficiency of its private sector. One can see this by comparing the situation in Russia and China, or by looking at the wave of deregulation that preceded the global financial crisis. Earlier, Niv Horesh (Niv Horesh), a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Nottingham in the UK, published a commentary in the South China Morning Post, which was widely circulated. He makes the more controversial argument that democracy is doomed. The reason for its demise is neoliberalism. Heriff criticized that Western countries promote individualism, restrict government power, and advocate free markets, which aggravate social inequality and lead to other economic injustices. If it continues, will the world pursue something else ...... like the Islamic State? No, fortunately it's not that bad yet. "The West is at a disadvantage in this debate, while the Chinese model has gained credibility," Herniff wrote." He continued: "Inaction may threaten the future of democracy." In his concluding remarks, he reminded people that the democracy of ancient Greece lasted only 200 years. On the surface, this looks like a joke. Is it possible to choose between Reagan's small-government doctrine and central leadership? Can't we follow the Swedish model or something else? From another perspective, if you agree that extreme free marketism is the main cause of the growing gap between the rich and the poor in the OECD (OECD) member countries, perhaps this statement is not unreasonable. After all, the largest redistribution of wealth occurred during the Cold War, when then-FBI Director John. Edgar. Hoover (J. Edgar Hoover) went house-to-house searches for Communists, while the American middle class rose. It can also be argued that when competing with other powerful economic models, capitalism is more moderate, but also more arbitrary. As an emerging superpower, can China, like the former Soviet Union, curb the cruelty and greed of capitalism? A perfect example is that Chinese bankers have much lower incomes than their Western counterparts-at least those who have not embezzled large sums of money to flee to other countries. The same goes for executives in the Chinese oil and steel industries; in general, for any senior SOE. This example strongly refutes the argument that China's top industrialists will go on strike if they don't get hundreds of millions of dollars in income. In some emerging countries, the rich can hide their assets abroad, resulting in a lack of investment funds in their own countries. China, on the other hand, keeps a firm grip on the country's capital account and limits deposits to the country. The centrally controlled bank transferred the funds to state-owned enterprises and used them for a series of construction projects, such as highways and high-speed railways, to successfully transform a backward country into a modern power. China has not completely copied the ideas in the "Washington Consensus", but has become a rich and powerful country in its own way. Many Westerners have also become rich: bankers, factory owners, technical consultants, and Australian mining tycoon Gina. Gina Rinehart-in short, all capitalists. China's rise has coincided with growing hardship for workers and the middle class in OECD countries. One of the main reasons for this trend is that China's open economy has impacted global labor market supply. Some economists have said with great interest that China's reform and opening up has "punctured the global salary bubble". For capital owners, this means that there are no more unions, no more overtime pay and pensions; at the same time, cheap labor and low-cost land have emerged, and regulatory costs have been reduced. This is not to say that the Chinese government is bent on weakening the middle class in rich countries; it means that China uses its vast territory and large population as a comparative advantage to accelerate economic development. In the process, China is not the antidote to neoliberalism, but one of its best partners. Time: 2015-08-03 11:37 | Author: Yan Mouse | Source: First Agricultural Economics | Editor: Zhai Tianchang