HARVEST: A farmer in Dangyang, central China's Hubei Province, dries his corn (WEN ZHENXIAO)

"Different countries have different agricultural resources and national conditions. It does not make sense to use agricultural labor productivity to appraise the agricultural modernization level," said Huang.

According to Huang, the comparable indicator for agricultural modernization should be the technology level, per-unit output of grain and total factor productivity. The comparison of agricultural modernization between different countries should focus on production costs and prices.

"China is behind the United States in this aspect, but the distance is not that large. It is greatly exaggerated by saying that the agricultural sophistication level of China is more than 100 years behind that of Western countries," said Huang.

According to Zhang Hongyu, Director of the Policy and Law Department of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, the goal of China's agricultural modernization is to transform traditional agriculture, reach the world advanced level in some aspects and approach the level of advanced countries.

Zhang said Chinese agriculture has made progress, and disagreed with He.

"In recent years, China has reached the level of advanced countries in terms of the yields of rice and wheat, as well as the level of newly developed countries in terms of 26 indicators, including agricultural mechanization and nutrient supply per capita," said Zhang.

According to Zhang, it is objective to say that Chinese agriculture is in good shape in spite of various difficulties and that its overall productivity is still low and farmers' incomes need to be increased rapidly.

Searching for solutions

The first National Modern Agriculture Development Plan issued in February this year is a programmatic document for the development of modern Chinese agriculture. It presents a blueprint for modern agricultural development for the whole century.

By 2050, the country is expected to have a moderately-developed agricultural industry and by 2100 an advanced one.

But low agricultural production efficiency could be the biggest obstacle hindering China's agricultural modernization.

How to improve agricultural labor productivity? Director He offered five suggestions, namely, deepening the reform of agricultural scientific and technological systems, deepening the reform of rural financial systems, advancing the reform of water conservancy, promoting the reform of rural land systems and implementing a high-quality grain project.

Breakthroughs in these reforms will help increase China's agricultural production efficiency substantially, said the report.

But He pointed out certain pitfalls could slow this much sought after progress. Take the rural financial system for example. Unmet demand for rural credit is huge. It is hard for Chinese farmers to get micro-loans to buy production materials. In addition, rural cooperative insurance for natural disasters is urgently needed, but no insurers are willing to provide this kind of insurance, even state-own ones.

He also suggested the government implement training programs for farmers to improve their farming techniques. While American farmers are surfing on the Internet for market information and agricultural technology, most Chinese farmers even don't know how to use computers.

"We need to train new farmers who can meet the need of marketization, industrialization, informationization, ecologicalization and globalization," said He.

According to He Xiurong, a researcher of the agricultural economy and policy with the China University of Agriculture, reforming the agricultural system and associated mechanics is the fundamental factor to agricultural modernization.

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