中国

The present paper deals with the problems of agricultural development on the industrializing rural areas in China, and the purpose of this study is to examine the trend of agricultural development after introduction of Production Responsibility System in Agriculture. For this study, farm surveys by interview method were made at three villages located on the industrializing rural areas in Huangyan County of Zhejiang Province. The three villages selected, i. e. Kangshan village on the less-industrializing rural areas, Fengyangzhong village on the individually industrializing rural areas, and Huayuanli village on collectively industrializing rural areas, are of different type from the standpoint of industrial organization. At each village, 40 representative farmers were purposively selected and interviewed. Findings of this study are summarized as follows. 1. After the Rural Reform in China that begun in 1979, the farmers have become independent managers who are responsible for their management and sensitive to the market informations. In the situation with large profitability gap between agriculture and nonagricultural business, the farmers in industrializing rural areas turn their attention to nonagricultural side business and seldom want to operate their farm seriously. Therefore, the agricultural investment by the farmers are very short. The agricultural funds from every other sources are also very short. 2. Even so, because of the small-size of their farms, the lack of national food market for them, and the insecurity of rural non-agricultural business, the farmers in the industrializing rural areas mainly engaged in non-agricultural business, seldom want to give up operating their farms and hand over their farm lands to other farmers mainly engaged in agriculture. Therefore, though the agricultural labor force decreased rapidly in accordance with the development of non-agricultural business in the rural areas, the farm size have hardly changed. 3. In result, it seems hard for the agricultural production in China to increase to meet the increasing food demand in accordance with the rapid development of Chinese economy. 4. In order to improve this severe situation, at least two tasks must be completed administratively by government. One task is to establish the supporting system of inducing adequate agricultural investment. Another task is to establish the system of promoting the transfer of the use right on farm land from the farmers who do not want to operate their farms to other farmers who want to enlarge the size of their farms.