摘要
本文通过系统梳理国内外学界关于家庭农场的理论讨论,澄清几个基本的认识问题。第一,农业生产的高自然生物特性决定了家庭经营是最适于农业生产的组织形式。第二,农业中的家庭经营不等于小规模经营,现代家庭农场在耕种面积和产出量上的规模已远远超出传统小农。第三,推进家庭农场的规模化经营是实现农业现代化的需要,长期保护和巩固传统小规模农业将阻碍农民脱贫和整体经济发展。
This paper investigates the literature on the family farm, theoretically reviews the main issues and debates in this academic subject, and clarifies some critical confusion and ambiguity from the perspective of agricultural transition and economic development. First, agriculture is an industry that is relevant to individuals working, as it is highly biological in nature. The core family is the most appropriate organizational mode of agricultural production. Depending mainly on family members as the source of labor, family farms can easily assign residual control and residual claim to one agent, which is necessary to ensure an efficient economic operation. While hired labor has occurred since ancient times, it nevertheless has its inherent difficulties in monitoring and supervision. Some biological characteristics of agriculture can be weakened by technological innovations such that factory-style operation becomes more feasible. Second, the family farm is not equivalent to small-scale farming. Modern family farms may be huge businesses in terms of cultivated area and output, while still being smallholdings in terms of labor use. However, all of the advantages of the family farm are specific to the production stage of agriculture, and family farms are quite powerless in facing their up- and downstream trading partners and need assistance with organizational measures and public policies outside the production stage. Third, the debate regarding the relationship between farm size and efficiency is still inconclusive. The arguments for there being an inverse relationship between farm size and efficiency （ i. e. , a decreasing return to scale） are largely based on observations of developing economies. Instead, observations of developed economies tend to justify the hypothesis that there is no relationship between farm size and efficiency （i. e. , a constant return to scale）. In analyzing agriculture across economies, common sense points to countries with higher per capita GDP having larger average farm sizes and fewer small farms, with the agricultural production in rich countries characterized by large farms and that in poor countries by small farms. Fourth, many observers suggest that policies favor smallholdings based on the inverse relationship of farm size and efficiency, while others object to such reasoning. One of the main arguments for the objection is that the alleged inverse relationship of farm size and efficiency actually reflects agricultural involution, and traditional smallholdings are efficient but unable to overcome poverty. Preservation and popularization of such modes of farming are not only unconducive to poverty alleviation and agricultural development, but also impede agricultural transition and the development of the economy as a whole. Fifth, the essentials of agricultural modernization are reducing the number of farms, expanding the mean size of farms, increasing farm productivity, and promoting migration from rural to urban areas, with agronomic and technological changes taking place. This transition makes the agricultural sector able to provide plentiful labor and inexpensive agricultural products for the development of the economy as a whole. Moreover, this transition is what enables the agricultural sector to keep talented farmers with the recompense from farming jobs. This amount is not inferior to the income that farmers can obtain in off-farm jobs, and thus helps to achieve the sustainable development of agriculture.
作者
韩朝华
HAN Chaohua(The Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Scienc)
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2017年第7期184-199,共16页
Economic Research Journal
基金
中国社会科学院创新工程项目的阶段性成果
关键词
家庭农场
规模化经营
农业现代化
Family Farm
Scale Farming
Modernization of Agriculture
