The greater the amount of cultivated land, the more it helps to enhance agricultural competitiveness
The greater the amount of cultivated land, the better the conditions for raising China's agricultural competitiveness, and the easier it is for farmers to specialize. The most effective way to protect cultivated land is not to rely on administrative orders, but to let market mechanisms play a greater regulatory role.
Recently, national leaders emphatically stressed the importance of protecting cultivated land, drawing public attention. In fact, protecting cultivated land has always been regarded as a basic national policy in China, and is supported by a package of specific policies. But protecting cultivated land has not formed a high degree of consensus across all sectors of society in China. In land management practice, this policy has encountered various dissolving factors, so much so that senior figures dare not take it lightly.
In China, the reasons for protecting cultivated land are indeed quite sufficient.
From the nature of the agricultural economy, cultivated land is never too much. China's amount of cultivated land seems quite large. Because we once collected agricultural tax from farmers according to how much land area they had, farmers concealed some land. In some places, the amount of concealed cultivated land could reach 30% of the total cultivated land area. Therefore, the actual national cultivated land area far exceeds 1.8 billion mu. If we sow 1.8 billion mu of grain on 1.3 billion mu of land (in some places more than 2 crops can be sown in 1 year), according to the actual situation in China's main grain-producing areas, with an average output of 500 kg of grain per mu, the total grain produced would be very considerable, so much so that even at China's population peak it would not be used up. However, this method of calculation is wrong.
The main problem facing China's grain production is not whether the absolute amount is enough, but how high the cost of grain is and whether the price of grain is competitive in the market. Excessively pursuing per-mu output is often uneconomical. If there is enough cultivated land, we can use less chemical fertilizer and pesticide to produce the same amount of grain, and can also reduce labor costs by expanding scale operations. Therefore, the greater the amount of cultivated land, the better the conditions for raising China's agricultural competitiveness, and the easier it is for farmers to specialize.
Some people do not approve of the “red line of 1.8 billion mu of cultivated land protection”, fearing that this policy will affect China's urbanization process, and some friends may attribute rising housing prices to this policy. This reasoning does not hold. Urbanization is of course very important; China's urbanization rate must gradually reach more than 80%, otherwise there is no hope for agricultural modernization either. But China already has a lot of urban land, it is just that the utilization efficiency is not high.
The most effective way to protect cultivated land is not to rely on administrative orders, but to let market mechanisms play a greater regulatory role. First, establish farmers' land property rights. When agricultural land is converted to construction land, it cannot be decided only by “quotas” or by officials, but should ultimately be decided by farming households. Second, strictly limit the scope of compulsory land requisition. Only land for public facilities may be requisitioned by the government. The relatively vague requisition condition of “public interest” should be abandoned. Third, land for industrial and commercial projects should follow market prices, and the state should no longer requisition land. When it conforms to planning, collectively owned land can directly enter the market. Through the flexibility of land planning, the state can introduce competition into the land supply mechanism and prevent land prices from being too high.
Finally, establish a more effective cultivated land protection mechanism. The main drawback of the current basic farmland protection system is that the delineation of basic farmland is relatively fragmented and is distributed in an interlaced and mixed way with construction land, making it very easy for cultivated land to be nibbled away. We can consider learning from good foreign experience and establishing an agricultural protection zone system. The state can delineate large, contiguous agricultural protection zones, and stipulate that within agricultural protection zones, except for national infrastructure construction such as roads, all other non-agricultural land occupancy can only decrease and cannot increase. Doing so can greatly reduce the regulatory cost of cultivated land protection, reduce land speculation coveting the conversion of cultivated land into construction land, encourage land consolidation, and increase the effective cultivated land area. Without these reforms, effectively protecting cultivated land will probably make it very difficult to achieve the goal.