Shanghai-based agribusiness conglomerate Chic Group is advocating modern big farming in China, its CEO Zhu Yanming told an agribusiness forum in Beijing Saturday.

Chic has teamed up with the Chongqing government and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization to work on rural-urban integration in an area of 40,000 hectares in Ba'nan district.

As a pilot program, it plans to use machines and technology to replace "backward" traditional farming there, said Zhu, who blamed farmers for creating food safety issues such as toxic ginger because of their ignorance of modern technology.

"Future Chinese farmers should be a new generation of farm owners, agribusiness entrepreneurs, farm workers, agro-mechanics …" Zhu told the forum, boasting that his final target is to "eliminate Chinese farmers as a class."

With big farming, as practiced in the US for example, China would need less than 1 percent of its current number of farmers, Zhu claimed.

Wen Tiejun, a prominent agricultural specialist, begged to differ, saying that capital- and energy-intensive big farming is not suitable for China or other Asian countries, which are densely populated and have limited land resources.

China already has an overall food surplus thanks to an excess of global capital and industry overcapacity, so there is no need to further increase its food production through more agricultural industrialization, Wen told the Global Times on the sidelines of a forum held by the China Europe International Business School in Beijing Saturday.

"The overall production of food in China is already one-third more than the general demand of the Chinese population based on healthy food intake," said the dean of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University of China. "If we save the food we waste, then we can feed 300 million more people."

He argued that the problems are waste and unequal distribution of food, so the key solution is to be frugal.

Wen said it is the agricultural industrialization of the past 15 years, not the farmers, that has degraded China's environment and created many food scandals.

As non-agriculture firms including US investment bank Goldman Sachs foray into areas such as pig breeding and blueberry farming in China, Wen reminded forum audiences that 2008's tainted milk crisis was stoked by hot money looking for quick profits.

According to a report on pollution sources in China released by the State Council in 2010, agriculture has overtaken industry as the top polluter in the country, Wen said.

The survey identified 5.9 million sources of pollution in China, including 2.9 million in the agricultural sector and 1.6 million in the industrial sector, according to the report.