Agricultural counties rushing to convert from counties to districts will inevitably affect food security

Recently, the news of Xinjian County's conversion from a county to a district sparked a wave of public discussion on the Internet. A relevant official of the Jiangxi Provincial Department of Civil Affairs once said that the plan currently submitted to the State Council for approval is one to convert Xinjian County as a whole into a district. If the conversion is approved, Nanchang City can further adjust its administrative divisions to solve the problem of Xinjian County's oversized scope. (People's Daily Online, August 3)

Discussion of converting counties into districts has been ongoing, for example in the cases of Nanchang County and Yujiang County. According to media reports, because administrative divisions lag far behind urban development, a trend of “converting counties into districts” has quietly sprung up in China, and more than 200 counties nationwide are “queuing up” for conversion into districts. So among these more than 200 counties “queuing up” for conversion, are Jiangxi's Nanchang County, Yujiang County and Xinjian County included or not?

If they are, I believe none of these three counties should be converted into districts, because all three are major agricultural counties. Although there is only a one-character difference between “county” and “district,” the change in meaning is truly enormous. I remember Wang Runnian, who concurrently served as director of the external publicity office and director of the news office of Chang'an District in Xi'an, saying: “Chang'an's conversion from a county to a district shows that Chang'an has bid farewell to a development path dominated by agriculture, integrated into Xi'an's metropolitan circle, and stepped onto a new stage of urbanization and industrialization.” This view should be correct. From another perspective, after conversion into a district, urbanization speeds up, urban investment expands, agricultural investment decreases, and it even often happens that agriculture, rural areas and farmers subsidize the city, so agriculture may basically be abandoned.

Under China's current system, the focus of a county's work is in rural areas, and county-level agriculture is basically the supply base of agricultural products for China's cities. Counties focus on rural areas, while urban districts focus on urban work. After a county is converted into a district, urbanization speeds up, and the focus shifts to urban construction. For example, Nanchang County, long known as a “land of fish and rice” and a “granary of Jiangnan,” is a major agricultural county centered on crop farming and aquaculture, an important national commodity grain production base, and a national modern agriculture demonstration zone. Once it is converted into a district, will this function change? Xinjian County is also a major agricultural county, a “land of fish and rice” famed along the shores of Poyang Lake. These major agricultural counties should be primarily agricultural and ensure grain production, but once converted into districts, after the focus of work shifts, they will no longer be primarily agricultural but primarily focused on urban construction. In the process of urbanization, arable land may be encroached upon, and rural areas may decline further.

In some places, land with good water sources and fertile soil is used for urban construction, causing a sharp reduction in good farmland. At present, a series of problems have been exposed in such links as land expropriation and cultivated land supplementation. Because the state requires strict implementation of the compensation system for occupied cultivated land, some places resort to fraud. For example, a few years ago, Yujiang County expropriated 525 mu of good farmland in the name of “building a high-quality high school campus,” but it was later used for real estate development (New Legal Daily, May 20, 2010). According to the State Council's 2004 “Decision on Deepening Reform and Strictly Managing Land,” for all kinds of non-agricultural construction that occupy cultivated land with approval, the construction unit must supplement cultivated land of equivalent quantity and quality, and the quantity and quality of the supplemented cultivated land shall be converted according to grade, to prevent occupying more and supplementing less, or occupying superior land and supplementing inferior land. The cultivated land supplemented by Yujiang County was in the Shangyu Village Group of Qianshan Village, Pingding Township, Yujiang County, but a reporter's investigation found that this “supplemented cultivated land” was in fact a stretch of red earth where only peanuts could be grown, and its quality could not compare with the original paddy fields. If Yujiang, a major agricultural county, is converted into a district, will it continue to devour good farmland?

Among the counties “queuing up” to convert from counties into districts or from counties into cities, I found that a large number are major agricultural counties. Taking Jiangxi Province as an example, besides the several counties above, there are also Shanggao County and Taihe County. Shanggao County is a pilot county included in the national key scientific and technological program for increasing grain production, and is also a “major national hog-exporting county”; Shanggao purple-skinned garlic has also successfully applied for “national geographical indication of agricultural products.” Taihe County lies in the Ji-Tai Plain (also called the Ji-Tai Basin), one of China's most fertile major agricultural regions, and remains a commodity grain production base in China. The fact that so many major agricultural counties are queuing up to convert from counties into districts or cities fills me, a person who has long studied “agriculture, rural areas and farmers,” with deep anxiety. Once these major agricultural counties are no longer primarily agricultural, they may fall into a situation where they have lost the foundation of agriculture yet cannot develop. Moreover, the state has always strongly supported these major agricultural counties. After the focus of work shifts through conversion from counties into districts or cities, will the huge sums of money invested be wasted?

Food is the first necessity of the people! For a large country with a population of 1.3 billion, the grain issue is one that absolutely cannot be ignored. In fact, it is very difficult for China's total grain output to increase substantially, because the area of cultivated land is shrinking year by year, water resources are dwindling, and especially noteworthy is the pollution of rural land and water resources, all of which pose serious threats to abundant grain production. Therefore, I very much agree with what Zhang Baowen, member of the Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and former Vice Minister of Agriculture, said: although the contradiction between grain supply and demand in China has eased somewhat at present, the situation in which production falls short of demand still exists, and there are still hidden worries for national food security. A small country importing large amounts of grain will not affect the international grain market, but once a country with one-fifth of the world's population needs to import large amounts of grain, there is an obvious “major-country effect,” and the international grain market will be thrown into turmoil.

With so many major agricultural counties converting from counties into districts (or cities), no longer primarily agricultural, no longer primarily about producing grain, how can one not feel anxious?