China Encourages Farmland Use Right Transfer

With a growing awareness of market- oriented farming, some farmers in Xiaogang Village, the birthplace of the household contract responsibility system in Anhui Province, east China, decided to rent their contracted farmland to companies or individuals engaged in industrialized farming.

In 1978, 18 households in the village secretly contracted the farming on collectively-owned farmland to individuals, which was absolutely banned at that time. They wanted to have the remuneration linked to output, abolishing the then prevailing egalitarianism by which every farmer got the same pay regardless of his performance.

This bold trial was changed into the household contract responsibility system later by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the central government.

Since then, 93 million hectares of China's farmland have been distributed to some 230 million rural households through a long- term farmland contract system.

Some two decades later, another significant rural land reform was about to occur at the same place.

After reaping the summer harvest, Yan Likun, a farmer in Xiaogang, signed a rental contract with the Yangtze Group, an agricultural syndicate, to transfer 20 years of operation rights of his 0.59 hectares of contracted farmland to the company.

The contract will ensure 4,500 yuan of annual rental income for the 67-year-old farmer, whose four sons have left home to seek their fortune.

Wei Jianhua, a watermelon grower in Liangtang Village, Anhui, has leased 33.3 hectares of farmland from some 200 farmers of 24 villages since 1996 to enlarge his plantation. Wei's farming efficiency is nearly 10 times higher than that of other local farmers.

While Wei is employing laborers for scaled farming, many of his land renters went out to buy cheaper farmland or open businesses.

In Danqiao Township, the farmland rental practice has made rich both the skilled farmers and the original owners of the land use right as the local land price has raised from 6,000 yuan to 15,000 yuan per hectare.

The land transfer system has made many farmers free to leave their land, and thus facilitate the population flow in China's rural area, said Wu Zhaoren, a noted agronomist.

Like the first reform, farmers' wish has been known and supported by local officials and then by the top leadership.

Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji said in his report on the outline of the country's 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-2005) that areas where conditions permit should be encouraged to explore the land operation rights transfer system.

He has called on local governments to actively promote the reform in rural areas to restructure the patterns of farming, improve strains, quality and economic returns of farm produce.

A survey in south China's Guangdong Province suggested that in rural areas, where earnings from the industrial and commercial sectors have accounted for 70 percent of the local revenue, 70 percent of local farmers are freed from farming, and the land operation rights transfer system has been carried out smoothly and fast.

In southeastern provinces, like Guangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, transferred land has taken up 18 percent of the total farmland acreage. Earnings from syndicated farming have accounted for 50 percent of local agriculture income.






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