Building Villas Through Land Transfer: Who Will Protect the Farmers' Interests?

Xingning City in Guangdong is an underdeveloped mountainous county. In recent years, the county has frequently brought in large projects with “bold, grand gestures,” treating “one-off land transfers” as a disguised form of land expropriation, and farmers' rights have been repeatedly violated.

“Land transfer” is formally known as “transfer of rural land contractual management rights” and refers to farmers transferring part or all of the land they have contracted from the village collective to a third party for operation under certain conditions, on the basis that the land contract right remains unchanged. The system is intended to improve the efficiency of land use and develop various forms of appropriately scaled land management.

However, “rural land” is not to be “transferred” at will; there are “rules to follow.” China's laws stipulate that land transfer should follow the principles of equal consultation and voluntariness, and must not change the nature of land ownership or the agricultural use of the land. Yet Xingning City has carried out “one-off transfers” of farmers' land for tourism projects, completely changing the land's “agricultural” function. Under the banner of “land transfer” but in reality a disguised form of land expropriation, this not only damages local agricultural production but also harms farmers' fundamental rights.

Cities need to develop, and people can support that, but the people's rights must not be violated through illegal transfers. So who exactly moved the farmers' “cheese”? First, the project developers, who drive down prices during land transfers and even resort to coercion such as veiled threats to force transfers; second, local government departments, which collude behind the scenes with developers, using administrative means to set the form and price of transfers and then grab land on a large scale; third, the land and resources departments, which “say” projects will not occupy farmland while in practice tacitly allowing local governments to expropriate farmland, “opening a back door” in oversight and approval.

In the national land use management system, there is an explicit requirement to strictly control the conversion of agricultural land into construction land and to give special protection to basic farmland; the “land red line” of 1.8 billion mu is also stipulated, on the one hand to ensure China's basic grain supply and on the other to protect farmers' basic rights. Commercial projects can certainly create handsome profits, but if farmland and cultivated land are all expropriated to “build things,” where will grain come from? Where are the 900 million farmers to go?

To safeguard national food security and protect the fundamental rights of the broad masses of farmers, local authorities should actively implement farmland protection policies, strictly observe the local “land red line,” and severely investigate and punish all illegal acts of land expropriation and land grabbing. At the same time, they should improve the land transfer system, standardize transfer procedures, and ensure agricultural production. Only by preserving farmers' “roots of farming” can the nation's “lifeblood” continue.