Rural Land Transfer Should Be Conducive to Sustainable Development

The phenomenon of rural land transfer has gradually increased in recent years. While land transfer has accelerated, some problems have also emerged. For example, in some places rural land transfer is not standardized, with oral agreements replacing written contracts; some land transfers last too long, such as around 30 years; some land, after transfer, is not developed in the direction of agriculture such as grain cultivation; some land has its use changed after transfer; and some land, after transfer, is even left in a de facto abandoned state due to improper management by the contractor and other reasons, and so on. The existence of these problems has affected the sustainable development of rural land transfer.

In response to the practical problems existing in rural land transfer, it is necessary to earnestly publicize and implement the relevant laws, regulations and policy provisions on rural land transfer, safeguard farmers' lawful rights and interests in accordance with the law, hold the red line for cultivated land, and ensure that rural land transfer is conducive to sustainable development. First, the principles of legality, voluntariness and compensation must be upheld, so that rural land transfer is open, fair and just, and the transfer operating procedures must be standardized. By signing standardized land transfer contracts, the rights and obligations of all parties are made clear. Rural land transfer must be publicly disclosed beforehand, supervised during the process, and the transfer contracts must be registered online and searchable. Second, farmers must be allowed to fully share in the benefits of land transfer. For land with a long transfer period, a base figure may be set for the rent, on the basis of which the rent may be indexed so that the rent is linked to the price index; for farmers who transfer their land, measures such as reverse leasing and subcontracting, organizing vocational retraining, encouraging them to work elsewhere, and purchasing old-age insurance may be adopted, so that they do not lose employment when they lose land and have reliable guarantees for their production and livelihood. Third, land transfer must not arbitrarily change agricultural use, affecting or even endangering grain production and food security. Fourth, the confirmation of rural land rights, transfer registration and so on should be incorporated into the scope of real estate rights confirmation and registration, and farmers should be encouraged and supported in carrying out financing-oriented land transfer in accordance with laws and regulations, continuously injecting funds into agricultural development, rural construction and so on. Fifth, efforts should be made to explore and improve the work of recovering and re-transferring rural transferred land, make full use of precious land resources, and avoid or even eliminate the phenomenon of abandoned cultivated land at the source.