An "alternative" problem in land transfer that cannot be ignored

Heshun Town is a pilot township in Tengchong County for the registration and certification of rural land contractual management rights. While investigating the land certification work in Heshun, we learned of an "alternative" problem brought about by land transfer in the town.

Heshun is an ancient town in western Yunnan, with a population of more than 6,800 and only just over 8,100 mu of cultivated land. It has won titles including "China's Most Charming Famous Town" and "National-Level Historic and Cultural Famous Town." As Heshun's tourism industry has grown ever larger, more and more villagers have begun operating "farmhouse restaurants" to increase their household income. The experience of nearby Jietou Town, where the magnificent scenery of ten-thousand-mu rapeseed flower fields directly spurred the booming development of tourism, moved the people of Heshun, and the town government also intended to organize farming households to grow rapeseed on a large scale. But the villagers had tasted the sweetness of operating tourism services and were unwilling to toil in farming again. Land was occasionally transferred among villagers, but only two or three mu at a time, and the farming seasons and crops were not unified.

This greatly worried the town government: with no one farming the land, it affected both agricultural production and, indirectly, tourism development. To address this, Heshun Town joined with a tourism development company to provide about 1 million yuan in funds free of charge each year to encourage farmers, through transfer arrangements, to plant rapeseed on more than 600 mu of land in front of the ancient town dam, beautifying the landscape and expanding tourism, with all income from the rapeseed planting going to the farmers.