Research On The Risk Aversion Of The Rural Land Transfer

The Central Committee of CPC has emphasized in many documents that, under the premise of thelong time unchanged rights of the land contracts, the government will encourage agricultural landmanagement rights to transfer to the professional farmland investors, the family farms, the farmers’cooperatives, or the agricultural enterprises, etc, and will cultivate the new agricultural managemententities, and develop various forms of scale operations. The large-scale management is the basiccondition for the development of modern agriculture. The farmland transfer is a prerequisite to achievescale operations. In recent years, the farmland transfer has been accelerated and the transfer scales haveincreased year by year, which has played a great role in promoting the development of agriculture tomodern direction, but the farmland transfer has exposed many problems as well, especially the poorsupportability of the farmers’ land rights and interests protection, the changes in other uses after thefarmland transfer, the common non-crop planting phenomenon, the increasing farm conflicts anddisputes year by year and so on. The potential risks in the farmland transfer involve the farmers’interests, food security, social stability, etc. In this paper, the five areas of north China (Hebei Province,Shanxi Province, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Beijing City, Tianjin city) have been chosen asthe research objects, mainly because Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia are three major agriculturalprovinces; and the suburbs of Beijing and Tianjin find the fast development of modern agriculture, andhave lots of cases of agricultural land transfers and scale operations, and their problems of transfers areof diversity and representative. Through the survey of every link of the agricultural land transfers inthese areas and the systematic study of all aspects of the transfer system, I want to explore thetheoretical framework of the research of farmland transfer from theory, and construct the risk preventionmechanism of farmland transfer from practice. This paper aims to enrich the theory of farmlandtransfers, and to guide and promote the healthy operations of the farmland transfers.Whether at home and abroad in nowadays or in thousands of years of China’s farming history,farmland transfer has always existed and the transfer forms have been generally similar, mainly basedon trade and lease. By sorting out the research achievements of the farmland transfer at home andabroad, I have summarized the main theory, the viewpoints and the methods, which provides thereference for this research. According to the system constraints of farmland transfer in our country andthe relevant policies, this research has determined to use the theory of the land rent and land price, theland property rights, the economies of scales, the principal agents, the design of mechanism and theinstitutional changes as the analysis basis, and has made a arrangement of the statistical data in the fiveareas of north China and carried out field research, By combining qualitative and quantitative methods,this research analyzes the main risk problems of the farmland transfer.This paper mainly focuses on five aspects of analysis and study. The first one is, based on thepresent situation analysis of the farmland transfer in the five areas of north China, to summarize the characteristics and problems of the farmland transfer on the scale and the form, the way and the scope,the time limit and the price, the specification and the information. The second one is, by using the riskperception methods and tools, through the analysis of the phenomenon of the farmland transfer such asnon-agriculture, non-food crops, transfer disputes, etc. in the five areas, to define the risks of thefarmland transfer from seven aspects such as the food security, the social stability, the farmers’ rightsand interests, etc, and on the basis of these, to construct the risk list of farmland transfer. The third oneis to construct the model of recursive hierarchy structure based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP),to analyze the food security and the social stability risk as the focus, according to the prioritization ofthe farmland transfer risks. The fourth one is, to build the risk source analysis framework of farmlandtransfer from three aspects, such as the participation subjects, the information channels and theoperational mechanism, so as to conclude that the main risk sources are the difference in objectivefunction of every market subject of the farmland transfer, the incomplete information of transfer, theunclear definition of the property rights, the transfer process without specification, and no supervisionafter the transfer processes. The fifth one is to design the farmland transfer risk prevention mechanismfrom the three aspects of the technique, the mechanism and the safeguard measures, and at the technicallevel, to design the risk control technology, from the loss control, the risk sharing and risk aversion, andat the mechanism level, to design the transfer risk prevention mechanism from the operating mechanism,the service mechanism, the incentive mechanism and the constraint mechanism, and so as to putforward the corresponding policy suggestions.The innovation points of this paper:The first point is to further deepen the research perspective. At present, there are a lot of researcheson the farmland transfer problems, which emphasize on the effects and existing problems after thetransfer, only at the farmland management level. This study is to systematically analyze on the featuresand problems of the farmland transfer, especially on the phenomenon of the non-agriculture, non-foodcrops, farmers’ land rights and disputes in the farmland transfer, to propose the risk of farmland transferfrom the angle of the farmers’ rights and interests protection, the national food security, and the socialstability, and to make the farmland transfer research perspectives go through from a micro level of theagricultural management to a macro level of the social stability and national food security aspects andso on, and innovate in the research perspective.The second one is, on the basis of the definition of farmland transfer risks, to build the farmlandtransfer risk list for the first time; and by using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), to construct thehierarchical structure mode of the farmland transfer risk; and to prioritize the importance of thefarmland transfer risk.The third one is to build the analysis framework of farmland transfer risk source from the threeaspects, the participation subject, the information channels and the operational mechanism, whichprovides the framework type from two aspects of theory and empirical to explore the farmland transferrisk sources or causes of the risk; and to provide the technical route in researching the subjects and therelationship of the risk forming parts, The forth one is to emphasize the farmland transfer technology effects of risk aversion, whilegeneral researches focus more on the perfection of the policies or the mechanism. In this study, thehedging mechanism focuses on the feasible technical operation, to evade the risks of farmland transferin multi-dimensional convergence and multi-angle interaction through the technology, the mechanismand the policies.Further deep study of the problem: The farmland transfer is the prerequisite for the realization ofagricultural modernization. It is an important content of the reforms of agricultural management system.It involves a wide range and sustains a long period. The transfer modes, mechanisms, policies and otherissues still need further study. At the same time, with the speed up of the urbanization in China, the rurallabor force is continuing flowing out of the countryside and the rural housing land and the forest landalso face many problems of transfer, which will also be the future study as a scalability contents afterthis research.