After land rights confirmation, farmers' land disputes have decreased noticeably
Aksu City in Xinjiang is a pilot county for the registration and confirmation of rural land contractual management rights, designated by the Ministry of Agriculture and the autonomous region's Department of Agriculture. Villager Yasen Shali, of Youkuri Karakalik Village in Tuopuluke Township, Aksu City, because of a shortage of labor and the burden of agricultural taxes, gave 12 mu of land to another farmer in the same village to cultivate. In 2006, as various agricultural taxes were abolished, the state also increased various agricultural subsidies. At this point, Yasen wanted to take back the land he had given to someone else and farm it himself. But the other party had already made continuous investments in the land and planted fruit trees, and was unwilling to return it. In the end, Yasen only got 6 mu of land back.
It is understood that in Aksu City, the average contract price for rural farmland is currently around 500 yuan per mu, and with three to four hundred yuan in various national preferential agricultural subsidies, the annual income per mu is at least more than 800 yuan, making land a hot commodity. However, because of unclear ownership left over from the second round of land contracting, land disputes have occurred from time to time.
Xiao Chunlin, director of the Aksu City Rural Cooperative Economic Management Bureau, told reporters that when the added value of land was low and there were still various agricultural taxes, farmers were unwilling to farm. In recent years, the added value of land has become higher and higher, agricultural taxes have also been abolished, and there are many agricultural subsidies, so those farmers who abandoned their land now want to take it back.
"To confirm land rights, the first thing is to remove farmers' worries," Xiao Chunlin said. Starting in February 2013, we first worked on the ideological work of village cadres, and then, with the cooperation of village cadres, carried out publicity on land rights confirmation among the villagers, letting farmers know that rights confirmation is not a redistribution of land, but a legal confirmation of the original holder's contractual management rights to the land, and that this will remain unchanged for a long time.
Yasen Shali said: "Both the township and the county gave us one-on-one explanations, for example, explaining very clearly how far the four sides of the field extend." Last June, the work entered the actual measurement stage. Staff in Aksu City used advanced equipment such as interpreted remote sensing images, GPS-RTK, and total stations to accurately measure the land area and plot shapes and draw a "fish-scale map," and the location of each plot had to be pointed out and signed on site by the owners of the adjacent plots, with none missing.
Xiao Chunlin said that confirming land rights is equivalent to giving farmers' contracted land an "identity card," effectively resolving historical problems in rural land such as unclear boundaries, inaccurate areas, unknown spatial locations, and unclear ownership, providing a basis for mediating and handling various disputes arising from rural land contracting, and further stabilizing rural land contractual relations.
Aksu City has already confirmed the rights to 12,000 mu of second-round contracted land for 790 farming households in 12 villager groups in two villages of the pilot Tuopuluke Township. The rights confirmation and registration work has received enthusiastic support from the farmers in the pilot townships and villages, and everyone has actively participated in it.