Land Transfer: How to Comprehensively Enhance the Value of Rural Land
In recent years, the rural land transfer market has been continuously heating up. Land transfer rents, which bear on transfer efficiency and farmers' rights and interests, have drawn attention from many sides, especially the phenomenon of continuously declining land rents. According to media reports, in a certain county in Anhui, the annual land rent was only 260 yuan per mu, just one third of the income villagers earn from farming their land, greatly harming farmers' interests.
Why are rural land prices so sluggish?
Compared with the ferocious "land king wave" in cities, the rural land market appears particularly sluggish. There are many reasons for this: first, rural land cannot change its use, which is an inherent limitation - farmland can only be used for agriculture; second, the return rate of smallholder farming is low, and the profits from agricultural production and operation are limited; third, the value of the rural land market has not yet been fully tapped at present, land rights confirmation work is still underway, and mortgage of operational rights has only just begun, so there is still a long way to go before the rural land market flourishes.
How can the sluggish rural land prices be changed and the potential value of rural land be tapped? Adhering to the agricultural use of rural land is a basic principle, and this cannot be changed. Therefore, enhancing the value of rural land must be achieved by developing high-efficiency agriculture and tapping the added value of land on the basis of its original value.
At present, some rural areas adopt the "company + base + farmer household" strategy, build brands, and strengthen the agricultural processing industry. This is a typical way to enhance the added value of land through developing high-efficiency agriculture. For high-efficiency agriculture to truly achieve high efficiency, it needs scale, which creates a paradox: low land transfer prices make farmers who rely mainly on land income for their livelihood unwilling to transfer their land, and without transferred land, how can scaled agriculture be developed?
Therefore, in addition to promoting high-efficiency agriculture, model innovation in the rural land transfer market is clearly also needed in order to comprehensively enhance land value.
The New "Internet Plus" Model May Help Multiply the Value of Rural Land
In Xinxiang City, Henan, the local land transfer center, through the new "Internet Plus" model, can not only increase the value of farmland, but also "turn the rotten into the miraculous," revitalizing unused wasteland and multiplying its added value.
A piece of wasteland transferred by the Xinxiang Land Transfer Center last year had originally been used by local villagers as a dumping site for household garbage, but after surveys by professionals at the transfer center, it was found that this wasteland had extremely high potential value in many respects, including transportation and the surrounding environment.
The transfer center published the basic information about this wasteland nationwide through an online platform, and a client soon took a liking to this piece of land. After nearly a year of transformation, this wasteland has now been developed into a modern integrated planting and breeding base, while the village committee that transferred the land used the funds obtained from the transfer for the construction of collective farmland water conservancy, village roads and other public service facilities.
Since starting operations in early 2014, the Xinxiang Transfer Center has published 555 pieces of land information through the Tuliu.com platform, with 66 transactions concluded, including agricultural land, industrial land and various unused wastelands. Through agricultural project planning and the bridging role of "Internet Plus," the value of rural land is showing a trend of substantial increase.