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IFPRI, Discussion Paper 01037, December Ruifa Hu, Yaqing Cai, Kevin Z. Chen, Yongwei Cui, and Jikun Huang (2010)

This study of China’s recent reform of its agricultural extension services finds that targeted policies improved availability for small farmers.

In response to small farmers’ difficulties in accessing extension services, China implemented pilot reforms in 2005 in two counties in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia. 

Previously, extension technicians focused on larger administrative and commercial activities and seldom visited villages.  When they did visit villages, they provided services primarily to demonstration farmers and large grain growers.  The authors report that “This approach was not meeting farmers’ demand for diversified extension services, particularly the demands of small-scale and less educated farmers” (2).

In 2005, the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy at the well-respected Chinese Academy of Social Sciences partnered with the Ministry of Agriculture and Canadian International Development Agency to design an inclusive agricultural extension services pilot.  Small farmer needs were identified through a Rapid Rural Assessment survey.  Randomly selected technicians were required to provide services (e.g. plant protection, fertilizer use, seed technology, irrigation, machinery, management, marketing) upon demand in randomly selected villages.  Technicians were evaluated and issued bonuses based on their availability to farmers, whether farmers accepted their services, and whether they adopted their technologies.

The pilot ran in 5 villages in each county in 2005, with 5 more villages per country added in 2006 and 2007.  By the third year of the program, each technician was responsible for three villages.  The pilot was scaled up to the national level over the following two years.

The authors study the effectiveness of this program with a random survey covering 2,730 small farmer households over 2005-2007.  Data was collected from 135 villages in Wuchuan and Pengzhou counties.  Particular attention was paid to the availability, acceptance, and adoption of extension services. 

For the pilot reform, 91.0% and 84.0% of farmers in the Wuchuan and Pengzhou treatment villages met with technicians, compared to 19.5% and 36.6% of control group farmers.  84.2% and 79.0% of farmers in pilot treatment villages received technician services, compared to 18.8% and 34.6% in control villages.  80.1% and 74.3% of treatment farmers adopted new technologies, compared to 17.9% and 35.6% in control villages.  Similar, though slightly smaller gains were observed in the Ministry of Agriculture’s scaled up program.

The authors report two principal findings: “First, the introduction of all reform initiatives considered in this study increased the availability and acceptance of public agricultural extension services for all farmers, and farmers actually adopted more public extension services in the reform villages than in the non-reform villages. Second, the farmers under the initial pilot inclusive reform initiative were more likely to receive, accept, and adopt the agricultural extension services than those under later reform initiatives that used some of the major components of the initial pilot reform” (17).

There are several policy implications that emerge from this study.  China’s agricultural extension services reforms were inclusive insofar as they targeted all small farmers, systematically identified farmer needs through surveys and questionnaires, made extensions technicians accountable, gave technicians material incentives to provide services to previously underserved small farmers, and evaluated technicians rigorously.  The authors end on a cautionary note, suggesting that China should continue to scale up this program but that political support is necessary to switch from top down to bottom up approaches, that extension staff human capital should be continuously improved, and that such reforms are costly on a national level.