Ministry of Land and Resources Strictly Controls the Total Amount and Pace of Converting Agricultural Land to Construction Land

Recently, data from the 2011 national land change survey released by the Ministry of Land and Resources shows that China's cultivated land stock has remained at 1.82476 billion mu, and the trend of net reduction in cultivated land has been effectively brought under control. Since 2009, the national cultivated land stock has remained above 1.824 billion mu for 3 consecutive years, which indicates that the target of maintaining 1.818 billion mu of cultivated land by the end of the national “Twelfth Five-Year Plan” period has been effectively safeguarded.

“Adhering to the strictest cultivated land protection system concerns China's food security and the issue of feeding more than a billion people, and no mishap can be allowed at any time.” said Xu Shaoshi, Minister of Land and Resources. In order to comprehensively uphold the red line of 1.8 billion mu of cultivated land, in recent years the Ministry of Land and Resources has explored and established an institutional system for the comprehensive management and protection of the quantity, quality and ecology of cultivated land.

⟦NL> In order to strictly control “occupation”, the Ministry of Land and Resources has adopted a multi-pronged approach using legal, administrative and economic means to strictly control the total amount and pace of converting agricultural land to construction land; it has implemented a system whereby cultivated land is first supplemented before occupation, strictly enforced the balance of occupation and supplementation, and continuously increased efforts to supplement cultivated land; at the same time, it has designated permanent protection for basic farmland; it has increased land inspection and law enforcement supervision, expanded the coverage of satellite image-based law enforcement inspection of land from 172 cities to the whole country, and strictly held violators accountable.

Over the past five years, land improvement projects have benefited 91 million farmers, with more than 31 million mu of newly added cultivated land, greatly exceeding the area of cultivated land occupied by construction and damaged by disasters during the same period, becoming the fundamental guarantee for the unbreakable red line of 1.8 billion mu of cultivated land.