Yes, I know that is contradictory. And so are the reports. It is a bit hard to figure out what is happening to China's farmers if all you read is reports. The best thing I know to do is evaluate what I am seeing from my point of view working here in an agriculturally-based town in Southwest China.
Sure, first hand accounts can be deceiving because I am only one person. My statistics may not be as accurate as the World Bank or the Chinese government, but much of the time, more usable information can be drawn from experience than can from numbers. So, what is really happening with China's farmers' incomes?
This morning, I read through an article in the China Society & People page of the Financial Times claiming China's poorest people are worse off after the boom with the poorest 10 percent seeing a 2.4 percent drop in their income. Then, I read a Xinhua report on ChinaGate saying the cash income of Chinese farmers is up 11.9 percent. Somebody needs to make up their mind.
Statistics are great, but in all the grand mathematics of it all, it is so easy to slant the final outcome. One of the above reports speaks of the poorest ten percent, which could be anything: the laziest ten percent, the ten percent that did not perform when the other sixty or more percent who are farmers did. The other report uses only a six month period, which could be nothing more than a deceptive reflection of annual raises and decreases in income levels. Who knows?
I would say the quality of life has neither increased or decreased by any substantial amount in the last five or so years. I think it also important to define "farmers' incomes". Is that just what they gain from their crops? This makes a big difference, because when families around here need money, they go off to Guangdong Province for a year or two and send back all the earnings they can spare. Is that "farmers' income"? They are farmers, they just are not farming.
Even if you are able to find some excellent statistics on China's agriculture industry incomes, those are still going to be very dependent on situations beyond man's control. This is agriculture, and bad crops happen. Bad years happen. Strings of bad years happen. Statistics are helpful, but the interpretation is vitally important. If the local selling price of crops I have seen is any indicator, the past several years have not seen much increase or decrease, that is, outside of the natural ups and downs of crop prices.
That is just my point of view. The best I can say is that I have seen no substantial increase or decrease in farmers' incomes. That is especially true if "farmers' incomes" does not include money earned outside of farming. And I know, "substantial" is a cop out from speaking forth a clear declaration, but it is still the truth. I do not see any super-poor 10 percent falling back nor do I see the 10 percent increase in farmers' salaries across the board. Farmers comments speak of nothing more than business as usual.
