China has entered an era when "industries should subsidize agriculture and cities should help rural regions". Though this government declaration came during Premier Wen Jiabao's tenure, in 2006, he has to give part of the credit for it to his predecessor Zhu Rongji.

Amid the widening rural-urban income gap and sluggish harvest in 2003, Zhu suggested in his last Government Work Report that the government try every means possible to give farmers a better life. Wen picked it up from there to take the concept further.

But that's not the only thing Wen and his colleagues in the State Council, the country's cabinet, have done for farmers and rural areas in the past five years. They have scrapped agriculture tax, which had been there for more than 2,600 years, offered nine-year free compulsory education to rural children and spent billions of dollars to build roads, hospitals and schools in the countryside, where about 55 percent of the country's people still live.

Last year alone, the cabinet allocated 420 billion yuan (US$60 billion) from the government treasury for rural development. The sum almost equals the total amount Zhu spent on rural areas from 1998 to 2003. But to be fair, the government's tax revenue and income from other sources has risen greatly from the years when Zhu was premier. Also, Zhu had two equally big problems to deal with: the Asian financial crisis and restructuring of state-owned enterprises.

"The central government's expenditure in and focus on the rural areas are impressive and preliminary achievements are satisfactory," says senior researcher with the Ministry of Agriculture Jiang Zhongyi. The government's efforts on this front have borne results, with the total grain yield staying above the 2004 level, and reaching a record high of 500 million tons last year. Farmer's income, too, has accelerated, with the year-on-year rate reaching 9.5 percent in 2007 and per capita income touching 4,100 yuan (US$560).

Wen has been leading not only from his office desk, but also from the front. He is the vanguard, in the true sense of the term. Take the heavy snow that wreaked havoc across central, east and south China before and during Spring Festival. He was out on streets with those stranded, down in coal mines with miners, aboard trains with harried passengers, inside factories with migrant workers, on planes flying to areas hit hardest by the worst winter in 50 years and on roads with people clearing the ice and slush and the debris left behind by snowstorms. He listened to migrant workers' complaints and ordered employers to pay them their rightful dues. He restored calm among those desperate to return home for that all-important Lunar New Year's Eve dinner with the family. He thanked the tens of thousands who worked courageously to make the lives of millions of others better.

"The changes in recent years have been impressive," says Guo Hongmei. But she wants the government to maintain the development momentum in rural areas. "The most important thing is a stable pro-farmer policy," says the 35-year-old National People's Congress (NPC) deputy from Tongjiang, a poor county in Sichuan Province - in fact, it's among the country's 500 most poor areas.

Perhaps that is the reason why Wen visited Tongjiang, first in 2001 and then in 2005. From his firsthand experience, he surmised that farmers in such counties face four major problems: lack of proper road links, poor education, poor healthcare and shortage of drinking water.

Four years ago, former NPC deputy Xiong Guanglin, also from Guo's county, complained during an interview that government expenditure on healthcare in west China's rural areas such as Tongjiang was particularly low. More than 90 percent women in cities delivered their babies in hospitals. The reverse was the case in the countryside, with only 10 percent births recorded in hospitals. Though 55 percent of the people lived in the rural areas, they enjoyed only 30 percent of the country's healthcare resources.

The situation changed for the better in Tongjiang a year later, after it got sizable funds from the central government and channeled it to all the towns and villages in the county to build schools and hospitals, and improve infrastructure. "No child in my county today is behind the nine-year compulsory education scheme," Guo says. That is a very important development because "education can help a county shake off poverty".

Most of Tongjiang's farmers have benefited from the rural cooperative healthcare scheme. Lack of treatment for want of money was the cause of 26 percent of all deaths in the county in 2004. Today the rate is 5 percent.

True, the changes are encouraging, Guo says. But it's also true that the urban-rural income gap has been widening - an average urban resident earns 3.32 times more than his/her rural counterpart. And if we take the national absolute poverty line - income of less than 785 yuan (US$110) a year - then 14.7 million farmers are still living below it.

Poverty is worse in areas such as Tongjiang, Guo says. "That's why we need more programs, more actions farmers need continuous support for the next three to five years."

Since people living in barren mountainous regions are poorer than their counterparts in the plains, it's important that they be relocated to more fertile or industrial areas. The mountains act as a natural barrier for people living in places such as Tongjiang to travel to cities and towns either to sell their produce or get a decent job. So the government, Guo says, is trying to relocate them along the very roads that some of them are building now.

One good news, according to recent studies, is that her county has a huge reserve of natural gas. This means the central government will pump out the gas and, in the process, generate employment and improve infrastructure in and around the area. The gas can be supplied to the economic hubs in the east and south to meet the rising demands there.

In exchange, "we are calling for measures to divert part of the profits from the resources-rich regions to the poorer areas," she says. "The government should come up with measures to compensate for ecology, too."

Rural development cannot be a year-exclusive scheme. Anything and everything happening in one year has to have a positive or negative impact on the next, as will last year's on this year's. The average inflation across the country last year was 4.8 percent, for instance, though in rural areas it was 5.4 percent against 4.5 percent in cities. The government has been trying to control inflation for some time now and Premier Wen made it his top priority in his Government Work Report yesterday, reflecting the administration's determination to keep prices of essentials as low as possible. But the effects of last year will take time to wither away.

What could make matters worse are the heavy snow in the central, eastern and southern parts of the country and the severe drought in the north. Together, they have damaged more than one-sixth of the country's total arable land - 121.8 million hectares in mid-2006.

Heavy snow and sleet before and during Spring Festival damaged 11.8 million hectares in south and east China alone, says the Ministry of Agriculture. Worse still, according to China Meteorological Administration, the harshest winter in 50 years could be followed by a drought in the east and floods elsewhere.

In the north, drought has affected about 11.1 million hectares of arable land since last winter, says the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters. The severity of the drought can be gauged from the fact that about 120,000 wells in Hebei and Shanxi have run or almost run dry.

All these have prompted the central government to allocate more than 500 billion yuan to the farming sector and rural regions - the amount is about 30 percent more than last year's. But money needs the support of advanced science and technology to streamline agricultural production and boost the yield.

Grains' prices have been rising throughout the world because many countries are importing it to improve their food security. And rising crude oil prices, which crossed US$100 a barrel last Friday, are likely to push up grains' price further.

The heavy snow and sleet disrupted movement of transport, especially those carrying food products, for four weeks in the country, pushing up inflation to an 11-year high of 7.1 percent last month. Prices of agricultural products increased sharply. Normally, it takes one or two months for the inflationary pressure to be transferred to manufactured and processed food products, and when that happens inflation could rise further.

That's why the year will be tough not only for farmers, but also for agriculture policymakers, Jiang says.

Premier Wen knows it. That's why he has made provincial governors assume responsibility for the "rice bag" (grain supply) program and city mayors for the "vegetable basket" (non-staple food supply) program in his work report. The responsibility policy first appeared in a premier's work report in 1995, but was discontinued after 1998. The policy proved effective in curbing inflation, which stood at 20 percent in 1994.

It's expected to bear results this time too, and make life better for consumers, as well as farmers.

(China Daily March 6, 2008)