Law Helps Protect Land in ChinaChina has maintained a dynamic balance of land acreage in this most populous country and the largest agriculture in the world, thanks to the Land Administration Law.This remark was made by Zou Jiahua, a vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), in his report to the ongoing 17th meeting of the NPC Standing Committee. The law is featured with the policy of strengthening the protection of land which says that a piece of cultivated land used for building infrastructure has to be made by opening up a new piece of land equal in size, according to Zou. In 1999, the government released the ban on occupying farmland by non-farming projects and the land used for infrastructure projects has been remarkably increased, but it has not led to a surprising rise in the occupation of cultivated land, due to the law, he noted. According to the Ministry of Land Resources, 24 of the country's 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions achieved a balance in land use last year. In some areas, the amount of land has increased due to the policies to reclaim land occupied for other purposes and to readjust the structure of farming, Zou said. China has a large population and lacks cultivated land. According to statistics made in 1996, the country had 1.3 billion hectares of cultivated land, 0.1 hectares per person on average, which is less than 43 percent of the world's average. Among China's over 2,800 counties, 666 have their per-capita farmland acreage below the alarming line of 0.053 hectares set by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. |
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