As an important component of my country's rural economic system, the concept of agricultural support systems was formally proposed in the late 1990s and has continuously evolved and improved in subsequent reforms and development.
In 1998, the Third Plenary Session of the 15th CPC Central Committee adopted the "Decision of the CPC Central Committee on Several Major Issues Concerning Agriculture and Rural Work," which for the first time explicitly proposed the establishment of a rural economic system based on household contract farming, supported by an agricultural socialized service system, an agricultural product market system, and a national support and protection system for agriculture.
Since the reform and opening up, my country's agricultural support and protection policy system has been continuously improved and perfected, achieving a fundamental shift from "taking" to "giving" and then to "prioritizing development." Policy objectives have shifted from primarily ensuring supply to a multi-faceted goal of "ensuring supply, promoting income growth, and strengthening the ecology," gradually forming a "three-in-one" system framework of prices, subsidies, and insurance.
At the operational level, central government documents began emphasizing the development of agricultural socialized services in 1990. The 19th CPC National Congress further proposed improving the agricultural socialized service system to achieve organic integration between smallholder farmers and modern agricultural development. In practice, new service providers such as specialized cooperative organizations and leading agricultural industrialization enterprises are constantly emerging, and the content of services is expanding from single links to multiple links and the entire process.
In 2024, the Third Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee adopted the "Decision of the CPC Central Committee on Further Comprehensively Deepening Reform and Promoting Chinese-Style Modernization," which for the first time proposed "improving the support system for strengthening agriculture, benefiting farmers, and enriching rural areas," emphasizing the need to improve the agricultural support and protection system, and reiterating the requirement to "improve a convenient and efficient agricultural socialized service system," marking a new stage in the construction of the agricultural support system.
