The Central Rural Work Conference highlighted the focus of realizing a moderately prosperous society in all respects and prioritized the battle against poverty.

The Central Rural Work Conference was held in Beijing on December 20 and 21, outlining the road map of the government’s work related to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers in the coming year. However, in-depth research shows that the conditions in recent years were not optimistic. Details are as follows:
1. Agricultural production: there’s still a big gap in grain yield per unit area between China and advanced countries, the gap in actual income between the rural and urban areas further enlarged, and the production of farming industry significantly declined under the impact of national policies.
2. Rural farmers’ income: the income of rural areas mainly came from migrant workers, and businesses in rural areas haven’t been developed. Migrant workers contributed 98.13% of the income of farmers in the first three quarters of 2019, while the income of non-migrant work only registered at CNY 122.9 billion, down 33.7% compared with the same period last year, and per capita income was CNY776, a year-on-year decline of 24.69%. Rural areas slipped back into poverty in 2019, and farmers suffered a loss of CNY230 billion in grain production, which led to a sharp decrease in non-migrant income as well as a slowdown of 0.5% in GDP growth.
3. Stopped growth in rural agricultural resources: National credit increased by CNY 16.65 trillion in 2019, a year-on-year growth of 12.49%, including CNY 2.01 trillion for rural areas (a growth of 7.59%), CNY 1.05 trillion for farmers( a growth of 11.55%), and only CNY30 billion for agriculture (a growth of 0.374%).  The shortage in resource pooling to rural areas and agriculture seriously led to a slowdown in the development of rural areas.
4. Slow growth in farmers’ income was mainly due to insufficient businesses. Higher logistics costs restrained the circulation of farm produce and the increase of farmers’ income. Besides, unreformed production mode of agriculture is the root cause restraining the development of rural areas and agriculture in China.
5. Fundamental strategy to solve these issues is to eliminate the current imbalanced income, which is the root leading to the slowdown of economy and the reduction in agricultural production. Only by eliminating income gap can these issues be solved, and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will be achieved.
Recently, some local government officials raised their wages without permission, which further expanded the gap between farmers and officials.