The Impacts Of Rural Labor Migration On Agriculture Development

Household contract responsibility system which first taken lead inimplementation in Xiaogang village of Anhui Province in1978pulled open theprelude of China’s rural reform. Soon afterwards, a large number of rural labor beganto move into cites looking for a job with the loose of the rigid urban-rural dualstructure. Labor mobility from rural to city has played an important role in helpingsurplus labor in rural areas obtaining employment, increasing farmer’s income andpromoting the coordinated development of urban and rural areas. However, a seriesof negative issues caused by the massive labor flow from rural to urban wereemerging constantly in early21stcentury, such as rural elite’s running off andweakness of the quality of main body of agriculture management because ofselective flow; increasing prominent problems of the old people, women andchildren left behind in rural areas; more and more abandoned farmland, etc, whichhave shook the foundation of the future of Chinese agriculture development. Evenmore important, all these problems are badly in need of solution.Inspired by the traditional urban-rural dual structure theory proposed by Lewis,Chinese scholar focused on how to improve the speed and enhance the amount of thetransfer of rural labor and emphasizes the impact on urban economy as well asincreasing farmers’ income when research on the problem on transferring rural laborto urban areas, while neglected the impact on rural social and economy.Basing on traditional dual economy theory and according to the latesttheoretical achievements at home and abroad, this article shifts research center to rural labor flow’s influence on the agriculture development in order to exploresolutions to settle current rural, agriculture and farmers’ problems. Throughtheoretical analysis, we not only put forward a new model which conforms to thesituation of China’s agricultural development but also take advantage of econometricempirical analysis based on the rural statistical data of Hebei Province from1995to2010. In the last part, we come to the conclusions combined with Hebei Provinceactual situation and put forward some policy suggestions.