China Headlines: China cools land transfer fever

As China encourages farmers to pool their land for better productivity, the country has gone on high alert for illegal seizures and speculation.

The latest warning came from Chinese President Xi Jinping, who this week suggested that arable land should be protected "the way we protect pandas".

Most of China's farmland is owned collectively by the people who work on it. As the rural workforce migrated to better paid jobs in the big cities, China began, in 2008, to allow farmers to rent out, transfer and merge the land they have contracted, amid a reform to bolster modern farming and reuse abandoned land.

But the sweeping land transfer fever has brought problems of improper seizure and use of farmland; big issues in the world's most populous country where food security and the well-being of both current and former rural residents are matters of the highest priority.

Earlier this week, President Xi Jinping queried the effectiveness of the "land for land" scheme, which requires local governments to prepare the same amount of new or restored arable land before any existing farmland is appropriated for non-farming purposes.

Xi told local authorities to take a step-by-step approach instead of a "great leap forward" and warned against headlong pursuit of commercial investment in arable land for non-farming purposes.

A HUMAN TIDE

Land transfers have speeded up in recent years with official blessing and the policy is credited with helping modernize farming and increase rural incomes.

Zhang Feihong, from east China's Anhui Province, is typical of farmers who have given up their land. Freed from his agricultural obligations, he has found much better paid work. Zhang rents his 1.6 mu (0.1 hectare) to a farming company for 1,222 yuan (197 U.S. dollars) a year. The contract allows Zhang and his wife to work elsewhere for salaries far higher than anything they ever made laboring on the tiny plot.

By last June, more than 250,000 square kilometers of arable land had been transferred, almost 30 percent of the national total, according to Chen Xiwen, deputy head of the central agricultural work leading team.Likewise, over 160 million farmers, again about about 30 percent of all rural laborers, have gone to work in cities.

Chen recognizes the need for land transfer in a rapidly urbanizing China, but said the 620 million people still living in the countryside should be allowed to "make their own choice", protected from forced transfers.

DANGERS OF SPEEDING

There is no shortage of experts like Chen warning against frenzied land deals that lead to forced expropriations and loss of farmland to real estate or other commercial development.

Protecting China's food supply against urbanization, pollution and soil degradation has been an uphill battle and is still not won. The central government has set a "bottom line" of 1.8 billion mu of arable land to ensure food security.

Xinhua reporters have found some local governments setting impractical targets for transfers. These fanciful targets can only be met by strong-arming farmers into transferring their land whether they like it or not. On top of this, some governments use barren land to balance that taken out of production and put under commercial development. An influx of speculative money, eagerly encouraged by officials keen to massage their land transfer figures, has made things even worse.

Zhang Chuntong is an agricultural official in Henan Province. He has observed investment flooding into "eco-agriculture" and agritourism. "Many 'investors' are simply stockpiling land and waiting for policy windfalls. They have little knowledge of agriculture and most projects are making losses," he said.

When projects fail, farmers and local governments are usually left to count the cost. Zhang Haojun, a farmer in Henan, leased his land to a company that grew sorghum, but as the harvest season neared, the company representatives vanished from their office.

"I was promised 1,000 yuan for a year's rent, but they only gave me 500 and left the sorghum to rot in the fields," he said. Endi