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初稿，请大家帮忙看看，文章的思路和表述是否清晰。
整篇报告是关于大中型拖拉机市场的。
这是报告的一部分，主要是写相关农业背景。由于耕地分散、农民收入低导致目前农用机械使用率不高，但随着进城务工的农民把土地转让出去，开始有些农民和农垦公司开始规模经营耕地。政府对三农问题的投入，农民的收入有望提高，从而购买力增强。这些对未来大中型拖拉机市场发展将起到很大推动作用。
Of China’s 960 million hectares areas, 123.39 million hectares are cultivated land according to the country’s annual Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development for 2003. Most of the cultivated areas are distributed on the Northeast China Plain, the North China Plain, the plain in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the Pearl River Delta and the Sichuan Basin.
Farming here for the most part is manual work and different farming works vary with the rate of machinery use. For 2003, of the 123.39 million hectare’s cultivated land, 61.33 million were ploughed with machinery, taking up 50 per cent; 42 million or 34 per cent were sowed with machinery; and 27.33 million or 22 per cent harvested. So far, use of machinery has been confined by small-sized operation of farmland and farmers’ limited buying ability. Yet with the government growing devotion to agriculture development, China is a promising market for medium and large-sized tractors.
Farmland in China is collectively owned in the form of a village or county. After the state was established in 1949, collective farming was practiced whereby farmers were organized into communes to take agricultural activities and received a share of the total net output. As farmers received the same pay regardless how much they contributed, gradually they lost their enthusiasm and worked inefficiently.
To make farmers better motivated, the household contract responsibility system was introduced in 1978. Commune system broke down and the collectively owned farmland was evenly divided and each household was entitled to a certain amount of land, depending on the size of the family. In return for land use rights, a household is required to sell certain amount of their produce to the state at a set price. The system boosted the agricultural development as it links rewards directly to a household’s l production and efficiency. Yet, under the system, farmland are divided into small-sized fields where large and medium-sized tractors can hardly be used in farming.
Large-scale farming now only exists on state farms which take up about 4 per cent of the nation’s total cultivated areas. Most of the state farms are located along the frontier or in remote areas, including Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region in the northwest, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the North, three Northeast provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning, and the Southeast provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangxi. State farms are operated by production and construction corps like an industrial enterprise where agricultural machinery are widely used.
While the country’s economy has been developing at a fast speed, its agriculture has lagged behind with the most pronounced problem being slow growth of farmers’ income. From 1997 to 2003, the annual growth rates of rural residents’ average income have been under 5 per cent, merely half of the growth rate for urban residents.
The slow growth is partly due to the labor surplus on farming. The country’s cultivated land areas account for a seventh of the world’s total, while its rural population takes up a third of the world total. Rural population amounted to 769 million in 2003, according to the Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development. Actually, the present farmland requires no more than 150 million work hands. The oversupply of labor on farms led to low efficiency and heavy reliance on manual work.
Another hindrance for agricultural development is the heavy burden of taxes and various fees on farmers. China is among a few countries to levy agricultural taxes on farmers based on average annual production. The tax rate currently stands at an average of 8.4 percent. Farmers are also required to contribute to education facilities, road construction and public affair management, among a number of items farmers have to pay a certain amount of fees.
Early this year, the government cut down the agricultural tax rate by 1 to 3 percentage points varying with different areas. At the same time, the government also made stated goal to abolish agricultural taxes within 5 years.
To improve their financial condition, farmers have been seeking employment opportunities in cities in the past 20 years. The Agricultural Department predicted that in 2004, the number of farmers working in cities would exceed 100 million, a figure that would keep increasing at an annual rate of 8.5 percent. In the coming 15 years, 150 million rural laborers are expected to flow into cities. The government is creating easier social environment to encourage the mobility.
With increasing migration to cities, there appeared the trend for farmland consolidation. Comparing returns from farming with that of employment in the cities, some farmers choose to rent out their contracted land to their neighbours or farming companies. By doing so, farmers can not get any financial returns as farming is not a profitable business so far, but the lessee should pay for all the due taxes and fees generated from land using. According to the Agricultural Department, transferred cultivated land areas account for an average five to six per cent of the total area. In the east provinces along the coast, transferred land amounts to 8 to 10 per cent of the total. Farmland consolidation will finally lead to the economy of scales where agricultural machinery will be widely used.
From 2004, the government has prioritized agriculture’s development and put the “agricultural, countryside and farmers” problems on top of its agenda. Besides tax cut, the central government will subsidize 10 billion yuan directly to farmers in 2004 and the special-use fund in support of agriculture will be increased by 30 billion yuan over that of 2003 to reach an unprecedented level of 150 billion yuan. This year the government also set up a special fund to subsidize agricultural machinery purchase. The regulation issued in April listed the machines which farmers could get a subsidy of 30 per cent of the price. Medium and large sized tractors are included. | 
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