The key to rural land transfer lies in guidance

“The 2015 Central Document No. 1 and the government work report of this session of the National People's Congress both treat rural land transfer as an important part of deepening rural reform at present, and explicitly propose guiding standardized and orderly rural land transfer, actively developing appropriate-scale operations, and raising the degree of agricultural organization.” said Ji Bingwei, a deputy to the National People's Congress and secretary of the Kaifeng Municipal Party Committee in Henan Province, in an interview with reporters.

Ji Bingwei said that at present, rural land transfer across the country is showing a trend of acceleration. Taking Kaifeng as an example, by the end of 2014, the city had transferred a cumulative total land area of 1.41 million mu, up 40% from the previous year, accounting for 26% of the city's household contracted cultivated land area. Of this, 920,000 mu went to farmers' cooperatives, family farms, and leading enterprises in agricultural industrialization, accounting for 65% of the city's total rural land transfer area.

Ji Bingwei believes that on the whole, rural land transfer is steady and healthy, but there are also some problems that cannot be ignored. In a few places, in pursuit of political achievements, there are situations of seeking excessive scale and speed, using administrative orders to assign targets, set tasks, and rush the pace, causing recipient entities to expand blindly and creating risks of breach of contract and violations. The models of rural land transfer are relatively uniform, mainly simple subcontracting and leasing, and both parties to the transfer mostly use a grain-based price conversion model to pay annual rent. At the same time, the tendency toward “non-grain” use is serious. A large amount of industrial and commercial capital has entered agriculture, and after rural transfer the land is relatively often used to grow vegetables, trees, and flowers and for breeding and leisure sightseeing, worsening the tendencies of “non-grain” and “non-agricultural” use in land transfer. At present, the area of transferred land in Kaifeng used for growing grain crops accounts for 60% of the city's total transferred area, while most of the remaining 40% is used to grow oil crops and vegetables, and the “non-grain” tendency also cannot be ignored.

“The lack of standardized contracts, the lack of service supervision, and the lack of safeguard measures in rural land transfer all affect the normal progress of land transfer work.” Ji Bingwei said that in some places, arbitrariness in land transfer still exists, and some transfer entities have not even signed written transfer contracts; in some places, the construction of arbitration institutions for rural land contractual management disputes is progressing slowly, and the mediation and arbitration mechanism for rural land contractual management disputes is not yet sound; in most transfer contracts, there are no social security clauses involving farmers who lose land, and no risk safeguard measures.

Ji Bingwei suggested that land transfer must first be correctly guided, adhere to the principles of legality, voluntariness, and compensation, take farmers as the main body, and let the market play a greater role; on the basis of the existing multiple models of rural land transfer, actively explore new types of land transfer models such as contracted land transfer characterized by share cooperation, the model of linking increases and decreases in urban construction land, the model of exchanging homestead land for housing or land contractual management rights for social security, and the model of direct entry of rural collective construction land into the market, and establish a closer interest linkage mechanism between the parties receiving land and the parties transferring land, so as to maximize the benefits of land transfer; formulate and improve support policies that encourage transferred land to be used for growing grain, reduce or eliminate the phenomenon of “non-grain” use of transferred land, and ensure national food security; and revise and improve as soon as possible the relevant legal liability provisions on “non-grain” use of cultivated land, raising the level of legal protection for transferred cultivated land.