Land rights confirmation policy gives farmers peace of mind
“Last year I transferred 100 mu of land, and the income per mu was around 1,200 yuan.” Recently, in Wuyi Village, Heli Town, Gaotai County, Gansu Province, villager Zhang Tianhong told researchers from the Ministry of Agriculture“Hundred Townships, Ten Thousand Households” Gansu survey team that in 2014, after years of running a small shop, he transferred 100 mu of farmland in the village at a price of 350 yuan per mu to grow seed corn, and set up a small family farm combining planting and breeding, with very considerable returns.
It was the spring plowing season, and walking through the gobi oasis in the heart of the Hexi Corridor——Gaotai County, the distant Qilian Mountains were still covered in white snow, while the villages and fields before one's eyes presented a scene full of vitality: row upon row of solar greenhouses and steel-frame sheds gleamed silver under the warm spring sun, and people in the fields were busy preparing to level the land and apply organic fertilizer……When the reporter met Zhang Tianhong, he was busy in the fields. He said: “Last year our area began pilot registration and confirmation of land contractual management rights, which gave us two a ‘reassurance pill’, and from now on we can transfer farmland with greater peace of mind.”
“Confirming rights to households is the premise and foundation of land transfer. Implementing land contractual management rights down to farming households and plots dispelled some farmers' concerns about land transfer.” said the relevant person in charge of the Gaotai County Rural Economic Management Bureau. Since Gaotai County launched the pilot work of registration and certification of rural land contractual management rights, the land contracting relationship has been further clarified, rural society further stabilized, land management further standardized, land transfer further accelerated, and agricultural competitiveness further improved. By the end of 2014, the county's transferred land area reached 160,000 mu, accounting for 30.7% of the total household contracted cultivated land area.
⟦NL> “Accelerating land transfer and supporting new types of business entities in carrying out large-scale land management have brought tremendous changes to Gaotai's agriculture and rural areas.” said Wang Junxun, head of the survey team. In order to better promote local land transfer and protect farmers' reasonable operating returns, he suggested that the local area, on the basis of further standardizing and guiding rural land transfer, improve grain production subsidies and support policies to protect farmers' enthusiasm for growing grain; increase support for the construction of farmland water conservancy facilities, the transformation of medium- and low-yield fields, and subsidies for the purchase of agricultural machinery, so as to strengthen the material foundation for land transfer; and actively cultivate appropriately scaled business entities, realizing land transfer in forms such as cooperatives and shareholding systems, so as to promote better development of Gaotai's agricultural and rural economy.