How can rural land transfer achieve healthy development?

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 strive to advance 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 to Develop Moderately Scaled Agricultural Operations", requiring an accurate grasp of the basic principles of land transfer and stronger supervision and risk prevention for industrial and commercial enterprises leasing farmers' contracted land. Recently, in several places in Hebei, thousands of mu of transferred land were subject to “breach of contract and abandonment of cultivation”, once again drawing close public attention to the issue of rural land transfer.

⟦NL> 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. “Who will farm the land” and “how to farm the land”, as well as how to raise the utilization rate of agricultural land, have become new problems facing the coordinated development of urban and rural areas. In the new era, orderly advancing 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 an unavoidable path for advancing new urbanization and accelerating agricultural modernization.

In recent years, China has actively carried out legislation on rural land management, institution building and model innovation, and has explored advancing rural land transfer and scaled operations, making considerable progress and achieving results. But the development and utilization of rural land still faces many prominent problems. In some areas, rural grassroots organizations often use developing the collective economy and increasing farmers' incomes as a pretext to concentrate farmers' contracted land without authorization for attracting external investment, artificially pushing forward unrealistic large-scale land transfer. “Breach of contract and abandonment of cultivation” by land transferees and “breach of contract and withdrawal from cultivation” by land contractors are widespread, seriously affecting the effectiveness and sustainability of the transfer of contracted land management rights. At present, the causes of “breach of contract and abandonment of cultivation” in transferred rural land are many-sided, and the following main problems have been exposed in practice:

First, land transfer lacks a long-term binding mechanism, management decisions are poor and operational supervision is weak, causing many attractive promises to come to nothing, with great arbitrariness; second, some investors are keen on contracting land and capital going to the countryside to seek profits opportunistically, obtaining agricultural subsidies and grants, causing short-term agricultural production input and poor sustainability; third, the foundation for land transfer operations is weak, with many places facing shortcomings in infrastructure, and comprehensive improvement of “fields, water, roads, forests and villages” not in place, causing 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 of relations among various interest subjects, and strive to advance 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, there is an urgent need to deepen 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 impetus of institutional innovation in the “separation of three rights” of rural land ownership, contracting rights and management rights, so as to provide strong top-level institutional support for effectively safeguarding land-related livelihoods.

Advancing innovation in the methods, use control and management of contracted land transfer requires fully respecting farmers' wishes as the main actors, taking improving rural land use efficiency, stabilizing comprehensive grain production capacity and safeguarding farmers' land rights and interests as the criteria, and relying on creating long-term mechanisms for rural land management, monitoring of scaled land transfer and control of land revenue distribution, so as to effectively prevent the pollution, destruction and abandonment of cultivated land, as well as the non-grain and even non-agricultural use of farmland, exposed in current scaled land transfer operations.

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 zones and national comprehensive new urbanization reform pilots, to deeply explore new models of rural land transfer conducive to improving the comprehensive benefits of land use and labor production efficiency, and to effectively advance the citizenization of the rural migrant population, the marketization of agricultural resource allocation and the rule-of-law 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.