A high-profile call to raise farmers' income at the national conference on agriculture over the weekend underscored not only the gravity of the issue but also the urgent need to address it.

At the conference, Chinese Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu urged local governments to do more to help farmers survive the fall-out from the SARS outbreak as well as other natural disasters.

The clear-cut message from authorities was that practical measures, not lip service, were urgently required to steer the country's rural economy out of its current predicament.

The income of about 9 million rural people has shrunk, revealing the rural economy's vulnerability to the SARS epidemic.

A nationwide survey by the State Statistics Bureau showed farmers' per capita cash income registered a meagre 3.2-per-cent year-on-year growth in the first half of this year, down by 3.4 percentage points on an inflation-adjusted basis. In the meantime, the per capita disposable income of city dwellers increased by 9 per cent to 4,301 yuan (US$520).

Worse, in the second quarter when the SARS epidemic peaked, rural people actually earned on average only 421 yuan (US$50.90) in cash, 11 yuan (US$1.30) less than for the same period the previous year. The contraction of farmers' cash income could foil the government's effort to narrow the already huge gap between urban and rural areas.

Non-agricultural income has become a major source of farmers' income growth in recent years. But the SARS outbreak cost many rural migrant workers their city jobs in the second quarter.

Mindful of this problem, the government reiterated the importance of creating non-farming job opportunities for rural migrants as early as late June, when the country brought the SARS epidemic under control.

But since July, farmers have been fighting floods in Central and East China and then an ongoing drought, aggravated by the highest temperatures in half a century. These natural calamities have reduced the prospects for a bumper harvest, the source of income growth for many farmers.

As the national economy has successfully maintained its momentum by achieving an 8.2-per-cent growth in the first half of this year, it is imperative to keep rural development on track.

Having recognized the need to fatten farmers' pocket, the central government allocated 25.7 billion yuan (US$3.1 billion), funded by treasury bonds, to the rural economy at the beginning of this year. And it has now invested another 3.25 billion yuan (US$393 million) in improving rural living standards and production.
At the national conference, the agriculture minister also specified eight measures to speed up agricultural restructuring, create jobs for rural migrant workers in urban areas, boost agricultural science and technology, and strengthen rural infrastructure construction.

All these measures are useful but must be aggressively implemented to create substantial benefits farmers can enjoy.

So, while doing more to curb farmers' losses from SARS and natural disasters, the government should also push even harder to carry out pro-farmer policies.