Problems Facing Cultivated Land Protection and Reflections on Their Root Causes

Protecting land, especially cultivated land, bears on the long-term stability of the country and the survival of the nation; promoting farmers' prosperity bears on the foundation of governance and national rejuvenation. As reform continues to deepen, problems affecting cultivated land protection, especially the protection of basic farmland, and farmers' prosperity keep emerging.

The Party Central Committee has made ensuring food security and helping farmers get rich as quickly as possible a political task for the whole Party and a national strategy, carrying out coordinated planning, setting forth requirements and goals, formulating measures, and defining tasks. This requires us to seek truth from facts, break new ground, and keep pushing forward the implementation of the strictest cultivated land protection system.

The current difficulty in protecting cultivated land lies in a flawed mechanism

Farmers cannot easily get rich by growing grain alone, which has become an important factor in the “non-grain” use of cultivated land. Grain production and farmers' income growth both come from cultivated land, especially basic farmland, yet current laws and policies contain some mutually constraining provisions that affect grain production and farmers' prosperity. On the one hand, only by guaranteeing a certain quantity and quality of basic farmland can the basic demand for grain be ensured; for this reason, the law sets the strictest provisions for basic farmland protection. On the other hand, the only resources farmers can use are their labor and contracted land, and to get rich, the most directly feasible approach is to make the most of the land they have contracted. Because growing grain yields far lower returns than non-grain cash crops, farmers often get rich by planting large amounts of non-grain crops on contracted land or developing livestock farming. If such practices are left unchecked, food security cannot be guaranteed; if restricted according to law, farmers' prosperity will be directly affected.

⟦NL> There are many cases in which plans are arbitrarily adjusted, undermining the pattern of cultivated land protection. Land for economic and social development and the legally mandated cultivated land retention quota are both rigid demands. On the one hand, economic and social development, especially the new type of industrialization and the new type of urbanization, will inevitably occupy a certain amount of cultivated land or even basic farmland; on the other hand, to ensure a certain amount of cultivated land and its quality, the law stipulates a minimum designation ratio of 80% for basic farmland, requires strict implementation of systems such as the balance between occupation and compensation, and has formulated supporting policies. However, the authority to adjust urban construction plans has been delegated at the lowest level to county and city people's governments, and “adjusting plans as needed” has become a “means” for local governments to occupy cultivated land——except for basic farmland occupied by national key construction projects with the approval of the State Council, local construction and farmers' housing that occupy basic farmland invariably evade approval by adjusting plans. This has led to one result: the phenomenon that “what should be basic farmland is basically not basic farmland” is extremely widespread. If such “development” continues, more and more cultivated land will be occupied, the quality of basic farmland will become lower and lower, and it may even be pushed “up the mountains and into the sea,” and grain production will inevitably be affected.

Overlapping management by departmental laws causes the effectiveness of cultivated land protection to be “discounted.” In China's current legal system, many specialized laws involve land management, such as the Forest Law, the Grassland Law, and the Water and Soil Conservation Law, which respectively set provisions for the protection and use of forest land, grassland, and wetlands. Viewed as a single law, the enforcement of these laws does not conflict with land management and use, but when they are enforced together with the Land Administration Law, contradictions emerge. The most prominent is that, with the national land area unchanged, the sum of the protection areas defined by the various specialized laws will greatly exceed the national land area, and much of the overlapping portion is cultivated land or even basic farmland. In addition, under the current institutional mechanisms, in order to meet assessment and construction needs, many places adopt selective law enforcement that suits their own interests, causing law enforcers to act independently, affecting the overall and broader situation, and making much of the lawful data false and affecting decision-making. When applied to cultivated land, the retained amount is greatly discounted.

Accelerated urbanization and abandoned cultivated land make the situation for protecting cultivated land even more severe. Accelerating urbanization is an important strategy of the Party and the state. Generally speaking, as urbanization advances, land occupied by urbanization construction, including cultivated land, will increase, while land occupied by farmers' housing, including cultivated land, will decrease, showing a “one increase, one decrease” trend. The actual situation, however, is that in the course of urbanization, both construction land occupying cultivated land and farmers' homestead construction occupying cultivated land show a double-growth trend, and farmers are unwilling and afraid to give up their roots in rural areas. More seriously, because grain prices are low and grain supply is relatively abundant, farmers who move to cities have for the time being achieved citizenized living, yet they neither have the enthusiasm to grow grain nor are willing to give up their contracted land, making the phenomenon of abandonment increasingly prominent.

Cultivated land protection subsidy policies are difficult to match farmers' actual needs, and the effect of cultivated land protection is relatively poor. The state has directly introduced reward and incentive policies to mobilize farmers' enthusiasm for growing grain and their conscientiousness in protecting cultivated land; in this regard, the central government's fiscal input is not only large in amount but also varied in name. However, due to regional differences, demand differences, and differences in current conditions, the central policies have not achieved ideal results in various places: first, subsidies based on contracted land area have not mobilized enthusiasm for growing grain, like “the wound is on the head, but the plaster is stuck on the foot”; second, direct subsidies to households can ensure that funds reach farmers' hands, but for grain-growing farmers the existing subsidies are a drop in the bucket, while those who do not grow grain look down on such a small subsidy, wasting it; third, subsidies are scattered and do not match farmers' needs. With such subsidies, although the amount of agriculture-related subsidy funds is very large, the status quo of cultivated land protection remains unchanged.

The way out lies in improving top-level design and perfecting the institutional system

It is not hard to see that the root cause of these problems is that the top-level institutional design is not entirely reasonable. To truly achieve the goal of cultivated land protection and ensure food security, the fundamental way out lies in reform. The 18th National Congress of the Party and the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee made comprehensive designs and arrangements for reform, and we should seize the opportunity, solidly advance the reform of land-related laws and institutions, and build an effective and operable institutional system for cultivated land protection.

First, implement responsibilities, with “statesmen” taking the lead. Party leading cadres, especially the principal leaders of the Party, must become “statesmen”; otherwise, the central government's decisions and arrangements and the state's unified orders will come to nothing because of “separatism” and “specialness.” The responsibility for cultivated land protection must fall on Party committees and their principal leaders. Party committees at all levels, especially those at or above the county level and their principal leaders, must truly understand both the current situation and the goals in their thinking and understanding, and be courageous in taking responsibility and pragmatic in seeking results, so as to fundamentally resolve the erroneous thinking of valuing development over protection, valuing the present over the long term, and valuing the local over the whole. Achieving this requires Party leaders at all levels to have strategic vision and whole-situation thinking; this is both a central requirement and an essential quality of a “statesman.”

Second, promptly amend the law and establish the status of the “parent law.” Governing the country according to law is the strategy, the guarantee, and the foundation. The law must be feasible, effective, authoritative, and unified. In land management, with amending the Land Administration Law as the core, land-related laws should be amended at the same time, that is, other specialized land-related laws should take the Land Administration Law as their basis, thoroughly amend places inconsistent with the Land Administration Law, and ensure that the Land Administration Law becomes the “parent law” of land management and other land-related laws become “child laws.” The national land should be designated by law for its use, with management departments and specific responsibilities clarified; the competent department of land administration shall be responsible for functional adjustment, use approval, and regulatory assessment, and shall be responsible to the people's government at the same level and the higher-level land and resources department.

Third, align powers with responsibilities, with provincial governments as the “center of gravity.” Give full play to the enthusiasm of provincial people's governments and make their powers and responsibilities unified. For cultivated land protection, especially basic farmland protection, no longer designate by ratio; instead, the central government shall assign the total protection area by province, and provincial governments shall implement it down to cities and counties. The central government delegates approval power and quota use rights, while provincial governments reclaim the power to adjust plans, so that plan adjustment approval and construction land approval match, expand provincial governments' land use approval power, and implement provincial governments' responsibility for protecting cultivated land. The central government is only responsible for assessment and, based on the assessment results, carries out rewards and punishments. At the same time, the central government must continuously improve the policies needed to regulate land use and protect cultivated land through administrative and economic means.