China Moves to Increase Grain Harvest

China announced Saturday a series of new policies aimed at increasing grain production, including an increase in state investment for agriculture and the levying of taxes on rural industries to subsidize farming.

The government--which over the past six years has dismantled Mao Tse-tung’s communes and permitted China’s 800 million peasants to cultivate their own individual plots--also said it will now try to encourage greater cooperation in the countryside.

Peasants were promised that they will get special loans to buy fertilizers and will be able to sell more of their grain at higher free-market prices this year.

The new measures were set forth in a special circular on rural policy for 1986 adopted by the Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council, China’s version of a presidential Cabinet. The circular did not say exactly how much more China will spend on its agricultural sector this year.

An announcement by the official New China News Agency said that the government hopes “to steady China’s agricultural production and avoid a slowing-down after an unusual rate of growth over the past few years.”

In the early 1980s, China’s grain output grew steadily. The 1984 harvest of 407 million tons was the largest ever reaped by any nation.

But last year, grain output declined about 7%, to an estimated 380 million tons. The dip was not serious enough to cause food shortages, but it caused serious concern among Chinese leaders about what might happen if there is another drop this year.

“We can’t be overconfident,” one Chinese official said this month. He recalled that bumper harvests in the mid-1950s had given Mao the assurance to start the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous economic development push that led to widespread famine at the end of the decade.

2 Factors Cited

At first, the regime headed by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping blamed last year’s problems on two factors: bad weather and a tendency of peasants to shift from grain production to more profitable fruit, vegetable and other cash crops.

Over the past few weeks, however, officials have begun to concede that the drop in grain output may also be the result of a steady decline in state and local investment for agriculture in China.

Under the “responsibility system” set up by Deng, Chinese peasants have been allowed to cultivate land on an individual rather than collective basis. Some critics have charged that, while this system led to a quick spurt in production, it also caused peasants to stop working on irrigation and storage facilities and other projects extending beyond their own family plots.

Last week, a spokesman for the Ministry of Water Resources told the New China News Agency that many irrigation and drainage facilities in the countryside have “fallen into disrepair through neglect.” He said that nearly 40 million peasants in China have been assigned to build or repair water conservation facilities this winter.

In the circular made public Saturday, the regime said that the responsibility system, which brought back family plots, “is a long-term policy and should not be changed against the will of the people.” Nevertheless, it went on, “regional and other forms of cooperation should be encouraged.”

The party document said that Chinese peasants will not be required to sell as much grain to the state under fixed-price contracts as they were last year but will instead be allowed to sell more of their produce at whatever prices they can negotiate on the free market.