Research On The Legal Regulation Of Agricultural Crowdfunding

Sharing economy has been rising rapidly in recent years. The supporting mechanism for popular entrepreneurship and innovation, such as the crowd-innovation, crowd-sourcing, crowd-lending and crowd-funding, has witnessed tremendous growth thanks to the new technologies, the Internet for instance. New commercial types and activities keep springing up and the economies both online and offline are intermingling in an increasing speed, which has widespread and deep influences on the ways of production, life and management. Strong and promising though, it has to confront the problems of the industry access, credit situations and supervision systems. In September 2015, the State Council published The Directive Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of the Supporting Platforms of Popular Entrepreneurship and Innovation(the “Directive Opinions” for short in the follow), which put forward seventeen opinions on the acceleration of the construction of the supporting platforms of popular entrepreneurship and innovation and on the steady development of the four “crowds”, namely the crowd-innovation, crowd-sourcing, crowd-lending and crowd-funding. The scale expansion of crowd-funding is around the corner.The pattern of “Agriculture + Crowd-funding” can be trace back to the USA. The agricultural crowd-funding was introduced in China in 2012 and saw an explosive growth in 2014. Nowadays there are more than 20 crowd-funding websites and other platforms in China, most of which have an agricultural section. The specialized agricultural crowd-funding websites and platforms are also on the up and up. A benign market environment is indispensable for the steady and healthy development of agricultural crowd-funding, which makes an improved legal system more than necessary.This thesis consists of five parts as follows,Part One, the introduction, which mainly focuses on the background, importance, existing results and the research methods of the rules and regulations of agricultural crowd-funding.Part Two, the summary of agricultural crowd-funding in China. This part summarizes the origin and development of agricultural crowd-funding, analyzes the concept of agricultural crowd-funding with existing theories and encapsulates the functioning of agricultural crowd-funding in China.Part Three, the risks of agricultural crowd-funding. Agricultural crowd-funding confronts many risks while functioning, which is in great need of legal support. Therefore, this part mainly focuses on the operating risks, credit risks and legal risks of agricultural crowd-funding.Part Four, the situation of lack of rules and regulations of agricultural crowd-funding. Based on survey and documents, this part clarifies the situation of rules and regulations of agricultural crowd-funding in China. Judging from the current situation, there is still no specialized rules and regulations of agricultural crowd-funding. In practice, most of the agricultural crowd-funding projects abide by the rules of the crowd-funding websites and platforms. Different websites and platforms have different operating standards. The fund trust, the model contracts among the project originators, platforms and investors and the internal controls still have no criterion. Besides, the situation and procedure of withdrawing and fund returning, the information disclosure and risk warning systems are also in an absence.Part Five, the improvement of the rules and regulations of agricultural in China. Aiming at the problems of the rules and regulations of agricultural crowd-funding in China, this part gives further elaboration on the improvement of rules and regulations of agricultural crowd-funding in China. The suggestions are as follows, firstly, ascertaining the subject and its responsibilities of the supervision of agricultural crowd-funding; secondly, improving the market access system, establishing the filing system, defining the responsibilities of platforms and the qualification of project originators; thirdly, perfecting the withdrawing system; fourthly, set up rules and regulations of trading, for example putting forward model contracts and constructing the systems of fund trust, information disclosure and warning systems.