China to Strengthen Arable Land Protection to Ensure Food SafetyChina must properly deal with the relationship between protecting arable land and economic development and work to protect arable land to ensure national food safety in the future, said a land resources official in Beijing Saturday, December 23.The major goal of China's arable land protection in the coming five years is to guarantee the land use for economic and social development, and to maintain a total arable land area of no less than 1.92 billion mu (one hectare equals to 15 mu), said Tian Fengshan, Minister of Land and Resources at a conference of the ministry. China must depend on its own arable land to feed its large population. Without great breakthroughs in agriculture technology,China must conserve the current arable land to meet the food demand, said Tian. In the coming five to 10 years, the demand for land use will increase rapidly with the accelerated modernization of development. An amount of arable land will be inevitably be used for construction. From 1997 to 2000, about 2.5 million mu of arable land were occupied for non-agricultural construction annually. The national land use plan stipulates that only 1.9 million mu of arable land can be used for non-agricultural construction annually in the coming decade. There will be a sharp gap between the demand and supply of land in China, according to Tian. Some arable land will decrease for the reason of ecological protection, and the waste of land is still rampant in some regions, Tian noted. He stressed that China must stick to the strictest land management policies, complement the arable land occupied for non-agricultural use, and implement policies exploring land use potential. |
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