Xi: Protect farmers' rights during reform

Workers pack rice harvested from a saline-alkali testing field before weighing it in Rudong county, Jiangsu province, on Oct 14, 2020. [Xu Jingbai/For China Daily]

President calls for measures to promote optimized allocation of rural land

President Xi Jinping has underlined the importance of protecting the rights and interests of farmers in accordance with the law during the process of furthering the reform of the rural land system in the new era.

In an instruction published on Monday, Xi stressed the need to unwaveringly uphold farmers' collective ownership of rural land while continuing the fundamental practice of rural families exercising their right to contract and manage land in rural areas.

It is important to ensure rural land contracting practices remain stable and unchanged on a long-term basis and adopt concrete steps to extend the current round of contracts for another 30 years when they expire, said Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Since the country adopted the household contract responsibility system in the early 1980s, the property rights of rural farmland have been divided into two layers: ownership rights that are collectively exercised by rural communities, normally villages, and use rights, which are held by individual households that contract farmland from a village.

The president highlighted the significance of work dealing with the affirmation of land contracting rights in rural areas, which he said offers assurance to farmers on a long-term basis.

He called for measures to enrich the forms of implementation of collective ownership, contracting rights and management rights to promote the optimized allocation of rural land.

It is important to adopt proactive steps to cultivate new types of agribusiness, develop specialized agricultural service providers and encourage and support small household farmers to become involved with modern agriculture in order to create an environment enabling rural vitalization and the modernization of agriculture and rural areas, he said.

Premier Li Keqiang said in an instruction that agricultural operations of various forms must be encouraged on the basis of upholding family-run operations.

The capacity to ensure the supply of grain and important agricultural produce must be bolstered, he said.

The instruction was read out at a national teleconference in Beijing on Monday that summarized work dealing with the affirmation of rights to contract rural lands and the issuance of related certificates.

Vice-Premier Hu Chunhua said at the conference that the use of contracted farmlands must receive greater oversight so that rural land is used only for agricultural purposes and designated farmland is used only for grain production.