How Resource Restructuring Unleashes Rural Economic Vitality
The setting sun paints red the stretches of rice paddies below the valley, and a gentle cool breeze blows along the spacious village road of Xincheng Village in Yingde City. On either side of the long road, one side features neat village houses with gray walls and colorful tiles, while the other side shows a hundred mu of fertile farmland about to be operated on a large scale.
Not long ago, excavators and bulldozers drove into the field trenches of Xincheng Village, leveling the uneven and scattered rice paddies into contiguous open plots. The tiny, fragmented plots once left fallow by many villagers will, with the villagers' consent, be centrally consolidated by the village in preparation for the next step of industrialized agricultural operation.
In Qingyuan City, resolving the problem of land fragmentation through rural land consolidation has become a local innovative move to break through the bottleneck of rural economic development. Since 2014, on the basis of carrying out reforms to the rural governance model and raising the level of rural organization, Qingyuan has explored and advanced the "three consolidations" of rural land resources, agriculture-related fiscal funds and agriculture-related service platforms, restructuring rural resource elements, promoting appropriately scaled agricultural operations, and raising agricultural production efficiency and the level of rural development.
Land fragmentation constrains agricultural output rate
Should they plant cash crops on the readjusted contiguous rice paddies, or contribute the land as shares to a specialized cooperative and wait for year-end dividends? Xincheng Village resident Zeng Fanyong and his fellow villagers are facing this new "worry."
Previously, Zeng Fanyong's family had 4 mu of farmland scattered across 6 locations, some beside the main road at the village entrance and some at the foot of the mountain at the village's end. Just traveling back and forth for farming consumed 1 hour on the road every day.
Land fragmentation was once a shared worry for Xincheng Village residents over many years. In earlier years, the Xincheng Village collective distributed land to each household on a "mixing fertile and poor" basis, and each household in the village had several or even a dozen scattered plots.
In Yangshan County, a mountainous area in northern Qingyuan, land fragmentation is even more prominent. When Yangshan County carried out a pilot land rights confirmation in 2013, it found that in some towns each household averaged 4.4 mu of land, which on average had to be divided into 9.9 plots. Some farming households even had more than 30 plots, separated by several kilometers, and every year a few plots would be missed during cultivation.
Distributing land to households stimulated farmers' enthusiasm for production, but as time passed, the constraints of scattered land management on farmers' increasing production and income became increasingly prominent. The economic value of traditional grain crops is relatively low, and agricultural output efficiency is not high. Especially over the past 10-plus years, because land cultivation yields poor returns, many young and middle-aged people have gone out to work, and more and more land has been left fallow.
"The land is too fragmented to create economies of scale, and it is also in a weak position in the market." said Lu Xiaopeng, deputy secretary-general of the Qingyuan Municipal Party Committee and director of the Office of the Rural Work Committee. Because the overall land use efficiency is not high, and fragmented land is also difficult to use to obtain necessary financial support through transfers, mortgages and other means, rural development has long been trapped in the dilemma of "no land available" and "no money available." Not only is it difficult for farmers to increase income, but the rural collective economy is also very weak.
For farmers to move from "having enough food and clothing" to "moderate prosperity," it is necessary to raise the level of rural economic development by improving agricultural production efficiency, and land fragmentation has become a bottleneck constraining rural development.
In 2014, Qingyuan had already been promoting the "three shifts of focus downward" in Party organization building, villagers' self-governance and rural public services for nearly two years. On the basis of the gradually evident results of rural organizational development, Qingyuan's comprehensive rural reform pilot advanced in depth, exploring the "three consolidations" of rural land resources, agriculture-related fiscal funds and agriculture-related service platforms.
Ge Changwei, secretary of the Qingyuan Municipal Party Committee, said that land consolidation is the focus and difficulty of the "three consolidations." If land resources cannot be consolidated and an appropriate scale and industrial division of labor cannot be formed, then the subsequent consolidation of agriculture-related funds, agriculture-related services, the agricultural operation system and farmers' cooperative finance will have nowhere to gain traction.
Villagers' self-governance promotes land exchange and adjustment
In fact, before Qingyuan's decision-makers realized the necessity of land consolidation, some local villages had already spontaneously carried out exploratory experiments in land consolidation, which also provided valuable experience for Qingyuan's reform.
As early as 1992, Xincheng Village in Yingde City concentrated 1,200 mu of mountain land and contracted it out in contiguous plots to villagers for planting bamboo and sugar tangerines. By 2004, the village collective concentrated another 200 mu of dry land and contracted it out in contiguous plots, and that year the village collective economic income had already reached 120,000 yuan. In 2013, the village once again consolidated all the mountain land and dry land, raised the rent and re-contracted it. At that time, the village still had 300 mu of rice paddies that villagers continued to manage in a scattered way.
In Yewu Village of Yingde City, more than half of the villagers had originally gone out to work. By the end of 2009, more than 50 mu of cultivated land in the village had been left fallow, and the villagers' per capita annual income was only about 3,000 yuan. Starting in 2009, under the organization and coordination of the villagers' council, and after more than 30 meetings of village representatives filled with debate, Yewu Village exchanged and adjusted all 902 mu of the village's farmland. After the adjustment, villagers began contiguous large-scale planting of sugar tangerines, mulberry cultivation for silkworms, and fishpond aquaculture, with gratifying results. By 2013, each household in the village had a net income of more than 150,000 yuan.
The experience of villages such as Xincheng and Yewu later became an important reference for Qingyuan in advancing land consolidation. In July 2014, Qingyuan issued relevant documents, clearly requiring each county (city, district) to select more than 2 towns as pilot areas that year, and through villagers' self-governance and self-determination, carry out land exchange and plot consolidation within the village collective. Xincheng Village residents also reached consensus at the end of that year, deciding to first consolidate all 300 mu of rice paddies in the village, and then exchange and adjust them to households.