Chinese leaders are cautiously planning a partial return to collective farming in hopes of raising productivity, according to an official newspaper report Wednesday. Ten years after land was distributed to individual farming households, Communist Party and government officials recently decided that ``household contracted lands should be redistributed ... and production conducted under a unified plan,'' the English-language China Daily said. China's reformist leaders dismantled the commune system a decade ago, allowing the rural economy to return to a family farming system that allowed farmers to sell some crops on the free market. As a result, grain production jumped by one-third and rural incomes tripled. But that growth has stagnated. China's farmable land is shrinking annually because of industrial development, and plots worked by individual farmers, averaging 1.5 acres, are too small for efficient mechanized farming. At the recent national meeting, party and government officials decided that ``conglomerates in charge of supply, production and sales'' would be established to make large-scale mechanized farming possible, the China Daily reported. It did not say what incentives farmers would have to join the conglomerates or give details about how the conglomerates would be set up. Supporters of such a system have carefully avoided calling the collectives ``communes,'' which evoke unpleasant memories of extreme poverty and the leadership's ``leftist mistakes.'' Aware that the change is likely to be unpopular among China's 80 million peasant population, officials stressed the household contract system was not being abandoned. Rather, it would be incorporated into a ``two-tier rural economy'' along with the collective sector. Redistribution will be done with the consent of the majority of local farmers, the report said. Calls have been heard for several years for a return to large-scale farming. Experts say the family farmer who brought prosperity to many rural areas has outlived his usefulness and must make way for large-scale mechanized farming.
