A vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) yesterday called for a rise in the resource tax in minority areas to better protect the rights and interests of minorities.

Ethnic regions that supply natural resources such as crude oil and gas receive lower compensation, which has slowed their regional development, Vice Chairman Ismail Amat said while reporting to the committee on the implementation of the Law on Regional National Autonomy.

The law says that the State should give a "certain amount" of compensation to minority areas that supply natural resources to protect local interests.

But inspections found that the compensation in some areas remained unchanged for more than 10 years amid the soaring price of natural resources, Amat, a Uygur, told the 25th session of the committee.

For example, he said, although the price for crude oil had increased from 478 yuan (US$61) per ton in 1993 to the current 3,800 yuan (US$487), the resource tax for crude oil in parts of Xinjiang remains at 12 yuan (US$1.5) to 14 yuan (US$1.8) per ton.

In addition, some large enterprises, which have resource exploitation programmes in ethnic regions, ignore local environmental protection and give little compensation for farmland occupation, but leave all the problems to local governments, the report says.

"To better protect the rights and interests of ethnic people, stricter rules and regulations should be made," Amat said.

Minority areas, most in China's western areas, are rich in natural resources. A State Council report on the exploration of resources released on Tuesday says large oilfields with proven reserves of more than 100 million tons have been discovered in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, with gasfields each having an estimated reserve of more than 100 billion cubic meters being found in Inner Mongolia.

Meanwhile, large and medium-sized non-ferrous mines have been detected in Xinjiang, Tibet and Yunnan, a province with more than 50 minority groups.

But the ethnic regions have 11.7 million people living in extreme poverty, accounting for 49.5 percent of the country's poor rural residents. And the local gross product of ethnic regions last year was just 8 percent of the national total, and people in these regions produced only 29.4 percent of the national average, the legislature's report says.

(China Daily December 28, 2006)