Heavily polluted land should be excluded from the permanent basic farmland designation

This newspaper, Beijing, October 14 dispatch, reporter Qie Jianrong: Regarding a suggestion raised by a National People's Congress deputy to “accelerate the adjustment of the land use nature of severely polluted cultivated land,” the Ministry of Land and Resources disclosed that it has already issued a reply. In the reply, the Ministry of Land and Resources proposed that cultivated land that is severely polluted and cannot be remediated should be excluded from permanent basic farmland.

In recent years, the pollution of China's cultivated land has become an indisputable fact. On April 17 last year, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Land and Resources released the first national soil pollution survey bulletin. The bulletin said that the overall national soil environmental situation is not optimistic, and soil pollution in some areas is relatively severe. The bulletin particularly noted that the environmental quality of cultivated land soil is worrying.

According to this bulletin, the overall national soil point exceedance rate was 16.1%, of which the proportion of severely polluted points was 1.1%; the point exceedance rate for cultivated land soil was 10.4%. In terms of pollutant exceedance, the point exceedance rates for 8 inorganic pollutants - cadmium, mercury, arsenic, copper, lead, chromium, zinc and nickel - were 7.0%, 1.6%, 2.7%, 2.1%, 1.5%, 1.1%, 0.9% and 4.8% respectively; the point exceedance rates for 3 types of organic pollutants - hexachlorocyclohexane, DDT and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons - were 0.5%, 1.9% and 1.4% respectively.

Both the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Land and Resources believe that because China's economic development model is extensive, the industrial structure and layout are unreasonable, and total pollutant emissions remain high, soil pollution in some areas is severe, posing a serious threat to the quality and safety of agricultural products and to human health.

Therefore, if cultivated land that is severely polluted and cannot be repaired is cultivated again, it will affect human health.

At present, China is carrying out the designation of permanent basic farmland, that is, on the basis of the existing work of designating permanent basic farmland, high-quality cultivated land around cities and towns and along transportation lines that is currently vulnerable to being occupied is given priority for designation as permanent basic farmland, so as to maximize the protection of comprehensive grain production capacity and ensure that the actual cultivated land area remains basically stable and that national food security is safeguarded. According to the requirements of the Ministry of Land and Resources and the Ministry of Agriculture, by the end of this year, the nationwide work of designating permanent basic farmland and improving the results will be fully completed.

The Ministry of Land and Resources disclosed that in the process of designating permanent basic farmland, verification found that in some places the phenomenon of designating distant land rather than nearby land and designating inferior land rather than high-quality land has begun to appear.

Will polluted land be mixed into permanent basic farmland? Regarding the suggestion raised by a National People's Congress deputy to accelerate the adjustment of the land use nature of severely polluted cultivated land, the Ministry of Land and Resources requires that, on the basis of the existing basic farmland designation work, high-quality cultivated land be given priority for designation as permanent basic farmland, and cultivated land that does not meet the designation requirements be excluded; at the same time, it stipulates that cultivated land that is severely polluted and cannot be remediated, as monitored, evaluated and determined by the agricultural competent department at or above the county level together with the environmental protection competent department at the same level and approved by the provincial-level people's government, should be excluded from permanent basic farmland.