China Urges Enterprises to Cooperate with FarmersThe Chinese Government will encourage cooperation between farmers and agro-enterprises in an effort to increase the efficiency of the agriculture sector in the next five years.Wan Baorui, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Agriculture Tuesday told a meeting that China's individual farmers, with a small production scale, face great challenges from the open market and lack channels to integrate together, slowing down the country's agriculture development. Cooperation between enterprises and farmers will integrate agricultural production with the processing and marketing sector, and greatly improve the competitiveness of both parts, changing the traditional way of agriculture production, he said. Farmers are allowed to hold shares of enterprises, as a way of cooperation, and the country encourages the development of agencies as a bridge between the two parts and to protect the farmers' rights and interests. Some 151 enterprises were selected as models to cooperate with farmers, including a number of township enterprises, and the government will give them preferential policies for receiving loans, financing, paying tax, importing and exporting, according to Wan. Enterprises, that now cooperate with individual farmers, have a total production value of 490 billion yuan (59 billion US dollars) and employ 5.72 million rural labors. |
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