Ensuring incomes

Agriculture is susceptible to the impact of nature, and the demand for agricultural produce is less elastic than in other sectors, he said.

That means it is not possible to rely solely on market mechanisms to ensure that farmers make reasonable incomes, he added.

He noted that with China's 128 million hectares of arable land, each household has an average of 0.52 hectares, less than 25 percent of their peers in Japan, while natural disasters and crop diseases also threaten the security of agricultural production and raise costs.

"Currently, grain subsidies provide 40 percent of farmers' incomes in the United States, 50 percent in the European Union and 60 percent in South Korea and Japan, but only 21.3 percent in China. We must strive to achieve a reasonable level," Chen said, adding that most farmers think growing grain is not worth the effort.

He proposed providing more support for major grain-producing counties. Last year, when Chen surveyed 13 major grain-producing counties, he found that their combined output accounted for 3.78 percent of the nation's total grain production, but the total revenue generated by those counties only accounted for about 0.1 percent of the national budgetary revenue.

"The central government should transfer more subsidy payments to counties to solve the problem," Chen said, adding that the share of major taxes provided to rural areas should be increased.