Facility agricultural land scope strictly prohibited from arbitrary expansion, three departments issue document clarifying
Report from our newspaper (reporter Du Xin) Recently, the Ministry of Land and Resources and the Ministry of Agriculture jointly issued the "Notice on Further Supporting the Healthy Development of Facility Agriculture" (hereinafter referred to as the "Notice"), which, while increasing policy support to guarantee reasonable land use needs for facility agriculture, further regulates the use of facility agricultural land and strengthens departmental law enforcement and supervision.
The "Notice" reasonably defines the scope of facility agricultural land. Facility agricultural land is specifically divided into production facility land, ancillary facility land, and supporting facility land, further clarifying the scope of the three aspects. When defining the scope, supporting facility land needed for large-scale grain production is included in the scope of facility agricultural land to support large-scale land management and large-scale grain production; at the same time, living land within ancillary facilities is excluded from the scope of facility agricultural land.
The "Notice" makes clear that arbitrarily expanding the scope of facility agricultural land is strictly prohibited. Land for commercial grain storage, processing, and machinery and agricultural input storage and repair sites, leisure and sightseeing resort sites supported by agriculture, various manors, wineries, and farmhouse entertainment, as well as land in various agricultural parks involving the construction of permanent dining, accommodation, conference, large parking lot, factory-style agricultural product processing, exhibition and sales facilities, must be managed as construction land in accordance with laws and regulations.
The "Notice" focuses on making provisions regarding such content as “facility agricultural land managed as agricultural land”, “reasonably controlling the scale of ancillary facility and supporting facility land”, “guiding the reasonable site selection of facility construction”, and “encouraging the centralized construction of public facilities”. The "Notice" makes clear that land for production facilities, ancillary facilities, and supporting facilities directly used for or serving agricultural production is agricultural land in nature and shall be managed as agricultural land; after production ends, operators shall carry out land reclamation in accordance with relevant provisions, and occupied cultivated land shall be reclaimed as cultivated land. For supporting facility construction involved in large-scale grain production in plain areas, where site selection is truly difficult to arrange on other land categories and basic farmland cannot be avoided, basic farmland may be occupied after demonstration.