Strengthen farmland protection and ecological conservation to safeguard national food security
To safeguard national food security, we must do a good job in ecological conservation, farmland protection and protection of core agricultural areas. The state has set a red line of 1.8 billion mu of farmland to ensure that the farmland area does not decrease. Delineating the ecological conservation red line is an urgent need and an effective means to curb the severe trend of ecological and environmental degradation.
To protect farmland and food security, the first task is to stabilize the overall situation of the country's main farmland and food security. We should focus on the macro overall picture, proceed from a strategic height, and, with an attitude of responsibility toward the Chinese nation for generations to come, identify at the national level strategic concentrated areas of permanent basic farmland protection, and enclose and protect the large-area, contiguous, high-quality and high-yield basic farmland of the Huang-Huai-Hai agricultural region, the Northeast agricultural region and the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River agricultural region, preventing various types of non-agricultural construction from encircling and cutting up basic farmland protection areas.
In hilly and mountainous areas, we should make overall arrangements for land used for agriculture, forestry and fruit growing, and industrial production, leave sufficient land for living and ecological purposes, and prevent competition for occupying farmland and excessive development of farmland. We should guide “industry up the hills”, build “terraced factories”, advocate and promote the rational use of low hills and gentle slopes, issue preferential policies to encourage slope-land industry, ease the contradiction between land used for industrial projects and farmland protection, form a win-win pattern of protecting farmland resources and guaranteeing land for development, and lay the foundation for the fast and sound development of the mountain economy.
In metropolitan areas such as Beijing and Shanghai, green infrastructure land should be rationally allocated and built. Shanghai proposed protecting more than 3 million mu of its farmland, which is to steward Shanghai's “green lungs”; protecting more than 1.6 million mu of its paddy fields is to steward Shanghai's “wetlands”.
We must further deepen our understanding of the connotation and ecological functions of farmland quality, and pay attention to the ecological functions of farmland. Improving farmland quality is not merely about raising soil fertility and increasing soil organic matter content; the most important thing is to raise the production capacity of farmland. We must establish a new and comprehensive view of farmland quality that is “premised on quantity, centered on production capacity, guaranteed by health, based on use and nurturing, oriented by efficiency, and relying on supervision as the means”. At the same time, special attention must be paid to the phenomenon of neglecting the ecological functions of farmland in various farmland quality construction projects. First, one-sided hardening results in more concrete space and less natural science and technology, losing habitats that shelter wild animals and plants. Second, excessive emphasis on convenient passage for people and machines and smooth water flow means water comes and goes quickly, and when water is not in use the canals dry up and ditches wither, cutting off the function of rivers to nourish all things. Third, one-sided emphasis on increasing farmland area, filling in ponds and low-lying land, and digging away mounds and hillocks, fails to carry out ecological construction in line with local conditions and cuts off the vitality of wild animals and plants.
To advance the construction and protection of farmland quality, we must highlight systematicness, wholeness, comprehensiveness and coordination, and establish a working mechanism of “government leadership, with rural collective economic organizations and farmers as the main body, land and resources departments setting up the platform, participation by relevant departments, overall planning, and integration of funds”; we need to establish an incentive mechanism, improve the system for distributing newly increased fees, and, in accordance with the principle of balancing rights and responsibilities, promote the mutual matching of newly increased fee distribution and high-standard basic farmland construction tasks; we need to explore and establish an economic compensation mechanism for farmland protection, and fully mobilize the enthusiasm of local governments and farmers to participate in land consolidation work.