4. Speed up efforts to develop modern agriculture and ensure sustained increases in rural incomes

We will, with as much care and attention as ever, continue focusing on our work related to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers. We will strengthen policy support for these areas, deepen rural reform, expand the channels through which farmers can find employment and increase their income, and work to ensure that the quality, performance, and competitiveness of agriculture improve.

■We will speed up structural adjustment in agriculture.

The output of food crops has continued to rise in recent years. This has helped to keep prices stable and ensure people’s well being, but it has also resulted in a buildup of excess stockpiles and falling market prices. To resolve this problem, we will improve the pricing mechanisms for agricultural products, while guiding farmers in adjusting what and how much they grow and breed in response to market demand and in making appropriate reductions to the amount of cultivated land devoted to growing corn. Following the principle of letting the market determine prices and delinking subsidies from prices, we will reform in an active yet prudent way the system of corn purchase and storage to ensure reasonable returns for corn-growing farmers. We will adopt a full range of measures to reduce excess stockpiles of food, provide strong support for the processing of agricultural products to increase their value,develop the live stock industry, and extend the agricultural production chain. We will formulate a plan for a new round of initiatives to turn marginal farmland into forest or grassland, with the target for this year being more than one million hectares. There is much to be gained in this, and it must be carried out to full effect.

We will promote the development of suitably scaled-up agricultural operations in diversified forms; improve policy support for family farms, large and specialized agricultural family operations, farming cooperatives, and other emerging forms of agribusiness; and cultivate a new type of skilled farmer. We will encourage farmers, on a voluntary basis and in accordance with relevant laws, to transfer the land they contract to work on in return for compensation, enter into cooperation or association based on land as shares, or place their land under trusteeship. We will deepen the reform of the rural collective property rights system, state farms on reclaimed land, collective forest tenure, state forestry farms, farmland irrigation and water conservancy, and rural supply and marketing cooperatives.

■The foundation of agriculture will be strengthened.

We will complete our work nationwide on designating permanent basic cropland and provide special protection for such cropland, promote the development of high-standard cropland, improve the subsoil of an additional ten million hectares of cropland, and increase the area of cropland covered by efficient water-saving irrigation by 1.33 million hectares. We will explore trials of crop rotation and fallow land. We will promote the innovation and application of agricultural science and technology. We will promote green, high-yield, and cost efficient food crop production and achieve zero growth in the use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. In fiscal allocations, investment in agriculture will be ensured, a national agricultural credit guaranty system will be established, the agricultural insurance system and rural financial services will be improved, and more investment in agricultural modernization will be encouraged.