Six "fluctuations" in China's grain supply and demand in the past 50 years

Introduction: since 1949, China has experienced six fluctuations in grain supply and demand There were two times in the 30 years before the reform, four times in the 20 years since the reform, and three times concentrated in the 1990s It can be said that there has never been a complete decline in food production In the six fluctuations of grain supply and demand, although the supply shortage in 1959-1961, which was called "three year natural disaster", was ostensibly a decline in production, the underlying cause was still that the wrong policies hit the enthusiasm of farmers for production Since the other five times are not the decline of production, and it is also related to whether China is a long-term food shortage, so it is necessary to make further analysis First, there were two fluctuations of grain supply and demand before the reform Before the reform in 1978, there were two shortages of grain supply in China The reason is not the problem of agricultural production itself The first fluctuation of grain supply and demand occurred from 1952 to 1953, which was manifested in the increase of production and the decrease of supply 1 The situation of food supply and demand in the early 1950s the land reform carried out nationwide in 1950-1952 not only eliminated the landlords and rich peasants, but also had to divide the land equally according to the population due to the land shortage In fact, even most of the middle peasants with relative agricultural production and operation scale did not exist Therefore, just in the year of the end of land reform, the output of grain and other agricultural products increased significantly for three consecutive years, but there was a shortage of supply to the city In 1952, grain purchase increased by only 11.6%, while sales increased by 44.7% By September 1953, the state grain purchase plan had only completed 80.1%, while the grain sales in October increased by 31.3% over the same period of last year, and the gap between supply and demand was more than 4 billion kg The situation of food supply is tense, which affects the price rise The government is forced to take emergency measures, put forward the policy of unified purchase and marketing, establish the circulation department of national monopoly, and form a new main body of agricultural products scale supply Under the circumstances that it is still difficult to enforce by administrative means, national industrialization and urban food demand have become one of the motivations for large-scale cooperatives, and together with the latter, they have evolved into a long-term policy of "the general line of the socialist transitional period" This system is still continuing up to now 2 Before liberation, researcher Cui Xiaoli, from the development research center of the State Council, pointed out that landlords were the main suppliers of "centralized and large-scale" demand for urban commodity grain in China He believes that although the agricultural productivity of old China was very low, the urban food supply was guaranteed for a long time Most of the years before the liberation of the people's Republic of China were low grain prices that hurt farmers, and there was an oversupply of grain As the landlords hold about half of the country's land, the land rent rate is as high as 40% - 50%, and the vast majority of land rent in kind In this way, the landlords also control about 25% of the grain production Since the landlords themselves consume little, most of the land rent they get is listed as commodity grain, which can guarantee the urban supply Another important reason is that before the liberation, most of the poor peasants and farm labourers paid the land rent with their pants on their belts The demand for food consumption of the majority of the poor in the city must also be limited by their income Therefore, in old China, there was a long-term phenomenon that grain prices hurt farmers and grain supply was surplus, which was closely related to the insufficient consumption of the urban and rural poor 3 The decentralized production growth can not form the scale supply Our further research shows that the main problem of grain supply shortage in 1953 is that the transaction cost between the government and the highly dispersed "small-scale peasant economy" after the land reform is too high to be traded After the land reform, the peasants divided the land equally and the production increased greatly, but the scattered production growth of 400 million peasants does not mean that the scale supply can be formed In the same period, due to the tense relationship between people and land, the land reform in most places is actually to divide the land equally, and the scale of land management of the self-employed peasants, rich peasants and middle peasants, who have the strongest production and management capacity, has also declined As a result, the scale producers and scale suppliers of grain in rural areas have disappeared Although the land reform has made the vast number of rural workers have their own fields, their enthusiasm for production has been greatly increased, and the main agricultural products, including grain, have been greatly increased However, the state has not yet formed a new major supplier corresponding to the "centralized and large-scale" demand for urban commodity grain in China A large amount of surplus grain is deposited in the hands of farmers, whose behavior is to store grain for disaster prevention, or to "barter" for other means of production Because the government entering the city can't directly deal with the 400 million small farmers, it has to establish two systems, namely, unified purchase, unified marketing and cooperation, to solve the problem of high transaction costs with the farmers 4 The reason for the long-term system of unified purchase, marketing and cooperation is that farmers, as independent economic subjects, are not willing to pay and sell grain at the low price of the country before the implementation of cooperation From 1953 to 55, the government's share of grain decreased by 800000 tons in the first three years of implementing unified purchase and marketing Therefore, in 1955, the government organized farmers to establish cooperatives When the government can deal with 4 million cooperatives instead of 400 million scattered farmers, the transaction cost will be greatly reduced Therefore, we should at least understand that the trading system of grain purchase and marketing must be operated on the organizational carrier formed by cooperation Why can unified purchase and marketing become the basic policy of rural economy in more than 20 years? By consulting the documents at that time, we learned that the central government did not intend to adopt this approach as a long-term policy when it proposed it, but only because of the special circumstances during the "first five year plan" period and subsequent events In 1952, China received US $5.4 billion from the Soviet Union to start investment, and directly imported 126 heavy industry project equipment, which is equal to one step across the two stages of western industrialization, that is, the early stage needs to go through the stage of workshop and workshop handicraft industry development of 120 years, and the later stage of power machinery driven heavy industry development In the mid-1950s, large-scale foreign direct investment led to a large number of urban employment, and absorbed 20 million young and middle-aged rural labor to support the national industrial construction They belong to the "high consumption" population of grain, which is about equal to the sudden increase of urban grain consumption of 50 million urban population at that time Therefore, in order to meet the needs of the national industrial construction and the increase of urban consumption, we can only take the implementation of the unified purchase and sale of grain as a long-term policy at that time The above analysis shows that the first fluctuation is obviously not a problem of insufficient food production, and the system of unified purchase, marketing, cooperation and communization is not required by the development of agriculture, rural areas and farmers themselves 5 The second fluctuation of food supply and demand: the second fluctuation of supply and demand in 1959-1961 "three-year natural disasters" took place in 1959-1961, which is the so-called "three-day disaster, seven man-made disaster" As we all know, it is mainly caused by highly collectivization and the impact of the great leap forward, which is still not a production problem in essence The second fluctuation of food supply and demand is a shortage - the supply of food has declined substantially for three consecutive years since 1959 This fluctuation is certainly related to the great leap forward in 1958, but the main reason is that after the first five-year plan, the Soviet capital intensive industry has achieved initial results, there must be two internal laws: first, the heavy industry based industrialization process must be "capital densification, exclusion of labor" Therefore, China's industrialization can not only solve the employment problem of the city itself, but also continuously export new urban employment population to the countryside On the one hand, it led to a large-scale movement of 20 million people in the 1960s and 40 million people in the 1970s On the other hand, it also transformed the system of grain purchase and marketing into the core policy of urban-rural dual structure, which played an important role in ensuring the survival of urban population and limiting the rural population to enter the city in the past 30 years Secondly, the national industrial products must complete the "exchange of industry and agriculture" to form the accumulation of expanded reproduction Under the condition of absolute surplus of labor force, cooperatives combined with traditional means of production and simple tools basically have no demand for heavy industrial products, so the government is bound to require to improve the scale of agricultural production units, so the highly centralized people's commune came into being However, communization deprives the peasants of their private property rights, which makes the laborers, the most important and leading factor of agricultural productivity, unwilling to actively invest Therefore, it should not have been a problem of insufficient production, let alone agriculture If the co-operation in 1955 also recognized the private property rights of farmers, the senior communes in 1957 would not recognize it The people's commune further denied the property rights of farmers, resulting in the general slack of farmers, and the cadres of the social team "concealed the private property rights", which led to the "high yield and poor harvest" in 1958, the statistical output increased, but the supply decreased significantly; and the subsequent“ Three years of natural disasters " In 1962, the adjustment of rural economic policy, through the restoration of "team-based" and allowing farmers to "three by one package", restored agricultural production 2 The four fluctuations of supply and demand after the reform basically belong to the type of overproduction 1 The "difficult to sell grain" and the third fluctuation of structural adjustment from 1984 to 1985 were born in 1984 It is "difficult to sell grain" after the implementation of "big package drying" in an all-round way Because the implementation of "big package drying" in 1982-1984 was just like the land reform in the 1950s, which stimulated the enthusiasm of farmers again The grain output was less than 600 billion jin from the original, and it continued to span three stages: 600 billion jin, 700 billion Jin and 800 billion jin By 1984, it exceeded 840 billion jin There is a feature of grain production in China, that is, the population goes up the steps and the grain goes up the steps If the increase of grain production is significantly ahead of the population growth, there will inevitably be excess Because, in terms of the long span of a century's history, the two curves of population and grain are basically parallel As the population control policy implemented since the 1970s is relatively effective, the population growth curve is smooth Considering that in the mid-1980s, urban consumers also had to use food stamps, so the demand elasticity of food was very small; therefore, in the case of sudden large-scale growth of food, there would be a surplus of food supply This is the first obvious fluctuation of grain supply and demand Now summing up the experience of 20 years of rural reform, we can see that the large-scale package not only improves the output of agricultural production, but also more importantly liberates the farmers Only when the farmers have freedom can the secondary and tertiary industries develop After 1984, both agricultural productivity and farmers' income have increased, which is due to the rapid development of township enterprises From 1984 to 1988, township enterprises transferred 13-14 million rural labor annually With the development of rural economy, the consumption of farmers also increased From 1984 to 1985, rural retail sales accounted for more than 60% of the total retail sales of commodities in the whole society, which was an unprecedented phenomenon The growth of farmers' consumption not only promotes the development of light industry, but also leaves a good space for the development of township industry So during that period, the national economy grew in a positive way Main agricultural products in 1990-1991