China will take a firmer stance on
arable land protection in the next five years to ensure that enough
grain is planted to feed its 1.3 billion people.
More than 100 zones to protect
farmland will be built in the next five years, covering 667,000
hectares, according to land and resources officials who addressed a
working conference on farmland protection yesterday in
Shijiazhuang, the capital of north China's Hebei Province.
The zones will get more funds and
technical support to upgrade farmland working efficiency and
increase output, said Sun Wensheng, minister of land and
resources.
"Each demonstrative zone will use
state-of-the-art technical and management measures," Sun
said.
Four to five such zones will be
built in each of the 13 main grain-producing provinces and regions
such as Hubei, Hebei, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Fujian. One to three
zones will be built in each of the remaining provinces and
regions.
The techniques that are expected to
make the zones successful will then be applied to the rest of the
country's farmland in the future.
In 2001, the ministry designated
108.9 million hectares, out of the country's 127 million hectares
of arable land, as basic cultivated land.
Boasting "the best productivity,"
the basic cultivated land is not supposed to be used for purposes
other than grain planting without special approval from the
ministry, according to the country's Regulation on the Protection
of Basic Cultivated Land, which was issued in 1994.
The country has 105.9 million
hectares of basic cultivated land so far this year, or 2.6 million
fewer hectares than last year.
"China needs at least 106.7 million
hectares of cultivated land to feed its future theoretical peak
population of 1.6 billion," said Pan Mingcai, director of the
ministry's Department of Cultivated Land Protection.
The shrinkage of farmland will
affect the economy and food security of the country, Pan
said.
Statistics from the Ministry of
Agriculture show that China harvested 450 billion kilograms of
crops in 2003, compared with the average 500 billion-kilogram
output in the past decade.
(China Daily October 22,
2005)
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