【正文】 rger than in China, and the development of largescale industry in these countries demanded a large labour force. Consequently, these countries took the road of capitalintensive agriculture, which relied on mechanisation to save labour. It is evident that the aim of agricultural modernisation in China is not chiefly to save labour. At present, we should not invest in large quantities of machines to replace labour. We should adopt advanced technology to replace land, and fully develop biochemical techniques. Thus we can make the most of technical advances, absorb appropriate amounts of labour, and try to increase significantly the yield per unit area. In fact, even countries short of manpower also paid great attention to the application of biochemical technology in the course of agricultural mechanisation. We can see, from the history of agricultural development around the world, that sharp increases in total agricultural output are almost always related to the advance of biochemical technology. Starting around 1850, the United States has gradually bee semimechanised and then mechanised, and its farmland has expanded enormously. One hundred and ten years later, in 1960, the total grain output has increased by times. However, the output per unit area decreased until the 1930s when the US began to popularise hybrid plant varieties and to use chemical fertiliser. Mexico serves as another example. Because Mexico successfully bred many shortstemmed, diseaseresistant and highyield wheat varieties, its output per unit area increased fourfold from 1949 to 1976. Thus, Mexico has turned into a grain exporting from a grain importing country over the last two to three decades. China presents a similar case. In the past three years, the production of rape has increased as a result of spreading earlyripening, highyielding and diseaseresistant wildcabbage type rape. The total output of rape in 1980 increased by 28 per cent over 1978, which put an end to China39。s imports of vegetable oil. From the above, it is predicted that the green revolution centred on improved varieties of seeds will have spread throughout the world by the year 2020. From then on, work on breeding seeds and controlling the bioenvironment will bring about another new agricultural revolution. It is clear that biochemical technology has a great effect on the modernisation of agriculture. We should not, however, ignore mechanisation in agricultural modernisation just because of biochemical technology. On the contrary, in certain sparsely populated areas, agricultural mechanisation should be carried out first. Although in general China is densely populated, even in the densely populated areas, machines should gradually be substituted for manual labour. To conclude, in accordance with the conditions of China, the modernisation of agriculture should rely mainly on the modernisation of biochemical technology, and secondarily on mechanisation. In addition, intensive and meticulous farming, and spreading scientific methods, are needed so as to change progressively from labourintensive to technologyintensive production. In this way, we can achieve the transformation of farm labour, make full use of agricultural surplus labour and continuously raise agricultural labour productivity. The Inevitability of the Transformation of the Agricultural Population The transformation of the agricultural population is defined as the shift of the agricultural population from agricultural to nonagricultural sectors. In all economic branches, the larger the agricultural population, the lower the agricultural labour productivity. Lenin pointed out, when analysing the development of the capitalist system in Russia, that the population in underdeveloped countries is almost all agricultural, which, of course, does not mean that those people only work on farming, since they can process their agricultural products by themselves. He also pointed out that the development of a modity economy itself implies that more and more people leave agriculture. In other words, it means that the industrial population increases while the agricultural one decreases. The decrease of an agricultural population is a historical tendency. At present, in such countries as the United States, Canada, Britain and France, the agricultural population accounts for not more than five per cent of the total population of the country. The United States now has seven million farmers, making up per cent of the total population. More than 100 years ago, one farmer in the United States could only support five people. By 1976, one farmer was able to support 56 people. In Canada, people directly engaged in farming and animal husbandry are less than 500,000, only accounting for per cent of the total population. So, on average, each agricultural labourer farms 3,000 mu and produces 100,000 kg yield of wheat, which is 100 times as much as the yield of wheat per labourer in China. The progress of modernisation of agriculture in these countries was acpanied by the transfer of the agricultural population. From the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, most of the population in the United States lived in the country working as farmers. In 1780, per cent of the total population was rural, which lasted until 1860, when the rural population still accounted for per cent of the total. This is similar to China39。s present proportion of urban and rural populations. However, the size of the agricultural and nonagricultural populations were similar at that time. The former was six million, per cent of the total labour force, while the latter was million, per cent. From 1910 to 1920 in the United States, with the rapid development of heavy industry and the transition from nonmonopoly capitalism to monopoly capitalism, semimechani