Rural Land Abandonment Is Serious; Investors Wait for a Chance to Pocket Subsidies

To accelerate the healthy development of land transfer, the key is to establish by law the rights and obligations of all parties involved in land transfer operations, and to push forward coordinated innovation in the institutions, mechanisms, policies and models related to land transfer.

Rural land transfer is an important part of deepening the reform of the rural land system. Last November, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the Opinions on Guiding the Orderly Transfer of Rural Land Management Rights and Developing Moderately Scaled Agricultural Operations, which require a precise grasp of the basic principles of land transfer and stronger supervision and risk prevention with regard to industrial and commercial enterprises leasing farmers' contracted land. Recently, more than a thousand mu of transferred land in several places in Hebei were “abandoned in breach of contract”, once again drawing close public attention to the issue of rural land transfer.

Land is the lifeblood of farmers, and land issues involve the vital interests of hundreds of millions of farmers. Along with China's rapid industrialization and urbanization, the large-scale migration of the rural population, the separation of people from land and the differentiation of employment have visibly accelerated, and “who will farm the land”, “how will the land be farmed” and how to raise the utilization rate of agricultural land have become new problems facing coordinated urban and rural development. In the new era, orderly promoting the transfer of farmers' contracted land management rights and developing moderately scaled agricultural operations is both a strategic choice for optimizing the allocation of rural land and safeguarding food security, and the only way to advance new urbanization and accelerate agricultural modernization.

In recent years, China has actively carried out legislation on rural land management, institution building and model innovation, and has explored ways to promote rural land transfer and scaled operations, making considerable progress and achieving results. Yet the development and utilization of rural land still faces many prominent problems. In some areas, grassroots rural organizations, citing the development of the collective economy and the increase of farmers' incomes, arbitrarily concentrate farmers' contracted land to attract outside investment, artificially promoting unrealistic large-scale land transfer; “abandonment in breach of contract” by land transferees and “withdrawal from farming in breach of contract” by land contractors are widespread, seriously affecting the effectiveness and sustainability of the transfer of contracted land management rights. The causes of the current “abandonment in breach of contract” of transferred rural land are many, and the following main problems have been exposed in practice:

First, land transfer lacks a long-term binding mechanism, and poor management decisions and weak operational supervision turn many attractive promises into nothing, with great arbitrariness; second, some investors are keen to contract land and for capital to flow to the countryside to seek profit opportunistically and pocket agricultural subsidies and grants, making agricultural production input short-term and poorly sustainable; third, the foundation for land transfer operations is weak, and many places face shortcomings in infrastructure, with comprehensive improvement of “fields, water, roads, forests and villages” not carried out thoroughly, resulting in low agricultural production efficiency and weak competitiveness; fourth, scaled land operations are deeply affected by market fluctuations, and the environment for modern agricultural development is fragile, with high risk.

To accelerate the healthy development of land transfer, the key is to establish by law the rights and obligations of all parties involved in land transfer operations, correctly handle the coordination among various interest holders, and push forward coordinated innovation in the institutions, mechanisms, policies and models related to land transfer.

Fully recognizing the systematic, complex and long-term nature of guiding the orderly transfer of rural land management rights urgently requires deepening the reform of the rural land system; in particular, it is necessary, in conjunction with cultivating new agricultural operating entities and building beautiful villages, to stimulate the vitality and driving force of institutional innovation in the “separation of the three rights” of rural land ownership, contracting rights and management rights, and to provide strong top-level institutional support for effectively safeguarding land-related livelihoods.

⟦NL> Advancing innovation in the methods of transferring contracted land, use control and operational management requires fully respecting the will of farmers as the main actors, taking the improvement of rural land use efficiency, the stabilization of comprehensive grain production capacity and the protection of farmers' land rights and interests as the criteria, and relying on establishing long-term mechanisms for rural land operational management, monitoring of scaled land transfer and control of land income distribution, so as to effectively prevent the farmland pollution, destruction and abandonment, as well as the non-grain and even non-agricultural use of farmland, exposed in the current scaled operations of land transfer.

In view of the reality of scattered and fragmented farmland operations in China, it is necessary, in conjunction with the practices of national modern agriculture demonstration zones, national rural reform pilot areas and national comprehensive pilot reforms for new urbanization, to explore in depth new models of rural land transfer conducive to raising the comprehensive benefits of land use and labor productivity, and to effectively advance the citizenization of the rural population that has moved to the cities, the market-based allocation of agricultural resources and the law-based management of agricultural land. In recent years, typical models such as rural land trust transfer that have emerged in Yiyang, Hunan and Shaoxing, Zhejiang are worth summarizing and promoting.