How to Offer Suggestions and Ideas for the Protection of Cultivated Land Quality
On the afternoon of March 8, a consultation meeting on handling proposals for “Increasing the Intensity of Cultivated Land Protection to Provide the People with High-Quality and Safe Agricultural Products” was held at the Beijing CPPCC Auditorium. Nearly 100 members of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) held face-to-face consultations and exchanges with heads of proposal-handling units including the Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the National Health and Family Planning Commission, the State Administration of Grain, and the State Food and Drug Administration, jointly offering suggestions and contributing ideas for protecting cultivated land quality and providing the people with high-quality and safe agricultural products.
“This year's No. 1 Central Document, in the section concerning food security, particularly pointed out that it is necessary to implement the action for the protection and improvement of cultivated land quality. To achieve food security, the element of cultivated land is indispensable. This year's session has many proposals on ‘increasing cultivated land protection and improving the quality and safety of agricultural products.’ This is a hot issue of concern to the people and to CPPCC members. Through such active consultation, we can push cultivated land protection and agricultural product quality and safety work to a new level,” said Sun Gan, Director of the Proposals Committee of the National Committee of the CPPCC.
“In recent years, serious incidents endangering the environment and health caused by heavy metal-contaminated soil have occurred frequently, and the quality and safety problems of agricultural products caused by soil pollution have increased year by year. Therefore, it is urgent to effectively strengthen soil pollution prevention and control and the supervision of cultivated land quality, and to protect important agricultural product producing areas, especially the source quality and safety of major grain-producing areas and ‘vegetable basket’ project bases. As the basic guarantee of national food security, permanent basic farmland protection areas should especially become the focus of current soil environmental quality supervision,” said He Wei, Vice Chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party.
Lai Ming, Vice Chairman of the Central Committee of the Jiusan Society, suggested: “At present, appropriately scaled rural land management is still at the exploratory stage. Promoting appropriately scaled rural land management is both an opportunity and a challenge for implementing the strictest cultivated land protection system, and it is imperative to explore a cultivated land protection mechanism compatible with appropriate scale. We should start as early as possible to build a protection mechanism under conditions of an appropriately scaled agricultural economy; prohibit the ‘non-agriculturalization’ of transferred land; support appropriate transformation and expansion of cultivated land area; and guard against new extensive and predatory production, carrying out constrained remediation of soil.”
“Insufficient stamina in cultivated land fertility, imbalanced soil nutrients, deteriorating ecological functions, and increasingly intensified pollution, this is the overall current situation of China's cultivated land quality.” At the meeting, many members projected their attention regarding cultivated land protection more onto cultivated land quality. They proposed that holding the red line for cultivated land requires not only protecting the effective quantity of cultivated land, but also paying more attention to quality, so as to place equal emphasis on quantity and quality.
In response to the problems and suggestions raised by the members, Sun Zhonghua, Chief Agronomist of the Ministry of Agriculture, said that cultivated land quality concerns national food security and also concerns the quality and safety of agricultural products. The national condition of many people and little land has meant that China's agriculture has long followed a model of high input and high output. Long-term high-load utilization of cultivated land, coupled with the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, has caused China's cultivated land quality situation to be worrying, with basic soil fertility declining.
In response to the prominent problems currently existing in China's cultivated land quality, in recent years the Ministry of Agriculture, together with relevant departments, has taken measures to promote the protection and improvement of cultivated land quality, implementing high-standard farmland construction, striving to add 800 million mu of high-standard farmland with stable yields despite drought or excessive rain by 2020; promoting scientific fertilization, with central government fiscal investment of 7.8 billion yuan since 2005 to implement soil testing and formulated fertilization, cumulatively implemented on more than 1.4 billion mu; and promoting the restoration and improvement of soil organic matter, with central government fiscal investment totaling 4 billion yuan from 2008 to 2014 to carry out soil organic matter improvement subsidy projects, cumulatively implemented on more than 100 million mu. “Next, the Ministry of Agriculture will conscientiously implement the deployment requirements for the action for the protection and improvement of cultivated land quality proposed by the central government, and promote the improvement of comprehensive agricultural production capacity and the quality and safety level of agricultural products,” said Sun Zhonghua.