Rising Prices Eating into Farmers' Income

For instance, the yield from a mix of cucumber, tomato and radish per mu can amount to 5,000 to 6,000 yuan each season, which is more than 10 times that of wheat.

Vegetables from our village are sold not only in China but also exported to Japan and South Korea, Li said.

The increasing demand and plus decent prices in turn continues to attract more growers to cultivate vegetable greenhouses instead of wheat fields.

In response to such trends, the authorities have rolled out measures to protect grain purchase prices and given out grain subsidies to encourage farmers to grow grain.

In the beginning of the year, the State Council approved 95.063 billion yuan in subsidies for farmers - with 1 billion yuan going to those who grew wheat and oilseed.

Similarly, the central authorities vowed this year to spend 562.5 billion yuan to support farmers and the rural sector, 130.7 billion yuan more than last year.

It decided in March to allocate another 25.25 billion yuan to this year's budget for the sector, mainly to subsidize farmers' purchase of seed, diesel, fertilizer and other production costs.

To further secure the country's food and grain reserves, the government has also worked out compulsory requirements on planting areas and varieties of grain being farmed.

Still, farmer Li said a "protective price system" to ensure grain prices did not guarantee a steady increase income along with the rise in costs. The prices at which grain was being sold to collectives remained more or less the same over the past several years, Li said.

But fertilizer and fuel costs have continued to increase, Li said. Our net income has, in effect, dropped from the year before.

In Hunan province, a survey found that a ton of the major fertilizer, carbamide, cost 660 yuan in 2002. That amount rose four times to 2,560 yuan this June.

The price of rice, however, reportedly increased by 40 percent in the last five years.

Cai Fulin, a 43-year-old corn farmer in Fuyu county of Liaoning province, had a similar story to tell. The cost of one type of fertilizer he uses rose by 31 percent to 2,500 yuan per ton from the year earlier.