Full Text: Report on the Work of the Government
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E-mail Xinhua, March 14, 2014
4. Advancing agricultural modernization and rural reform and development
Agriculture is important for expanding domestic demand and making structural adjustment, and it is a sector vital for ensuring China's stability and maintaining public confidence. We must make doing a good job in our work relating to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers the number one priority in all our endeavors and accelerate agricultural modernization in order to ensure China's food security and increase farmers' incomes.
We will make sure that China's cultivated land area does not fall below the red line of 120 million hectares. We will improve the quality of cultivated land, increase overall agricultural production capacity, and guarantee our basic self-sufficiency of cereal grains and absolute grain security. In this way, we will have full control over the food supply of China's 1.3 billion people.
We will strengthen policies for supporting and protecting agriculture.
We will raise the minimum purchase prices of wheat and rice, and continue to implement the policy on purchasing and stockpiling corn, canola seeds and sugar on an ad hoc basis. We will consider the introduction of a system of guaranteed base prices for agricultural products, under which subsidies will be given to producers when market prices are too low and to low-income consumers when market prices are too high.
Increases in agricultural subsidies will be mainly provided to support the production of grain and other major agricultural products, new types of agricultural businesses and major agricultural regions. More rewards and subsidies will be given to major counties that produce grain, canola seed or hogs, and support will also be provided for beef and mutton production.
We will improve the subsoil of farmland to promote the increase in agricultural output, and carry out a trial this year on 6.67 million hectares of farmland. Funds for agricultural development will be merged and allocated in a coordinated way. Even though our financial resources are strained, we must ensure that spending on agriculture always increases.We will strengthen the foundation of agricultural and rural development.
Investment will be concentrated on building a number of major water conservancy projects. Over 70 billion yuan will be allocated from the central government budget this year to fund major projects to divert water, protect key water sources, harness rivers and lakes, and develop efficient water-saving irrigation. All local governments need to give higher priority to building small and medium-sized water conservancy projects and solve the "last-kilometer" problem of farmland not being connected with main irrigation channels.
Efforts will be sped up to increase the acreage of high-standard farmland that produces good yields in times of drought or excessive rain. We will work harder to breed important superior crop varieties, and develop and extend the use of new types of efficient agricultural machinery. We will improve rural infrastructure such as roads, telecommunications services, and water, electricity and methane supply. A total of 2.6 million rundown rural houses will be rebuilt and 200,000 kilometers of rural roads will be upgraded.
We will give high priority to resolving problems facing children, women and older people who are left behind in rural villages by rural migrant workers working in cities. Safe drinking water will be made available to another 60 million rural residents. Through hard work this year and next, we must provide safe drinking water to all rural residents.
We will vigorously push forward rural reform.
We will adhere to and improve the basic rural management system and grant farmers more property rights. We will ensure that rural land contract relations will long remain unchanged, and promptly determine, register and certify the rights to contracted use of land and the use of collective land for construction purposes in rural areas. We will guide the orderly transfer of contracted land-use rights and prudently carry out trials to reform the rural land system. We will maintain household operations as the basis; cultivate new types of agricultural businesses, such as large and specialized family businesses, family farms, farmer cooperatives, and agribusinesses; and develop large-scale agricultural businesses of various types. We will train a new type of professional farmers.
We will improve tenure reform for collective forests and accelerate the reform of state-owned farms, grazing land and forestry farms. We will improve commercial agricultural services and carry out trials of comprehensive reform of rural supply and marketing cooperatives. In carrying out rural reform, we need to base ourselves on actual conditions, conduct trials first, fully respect farmers' wishes, and steadfastly protect their legitimate rights and interests.
We will explore new ways to alleviate poverty through development.
We will move faster to promote development of contiguous poor areas and reduce poverty there. The central government will increase support for major trans-regional infrastructure projects and economic coordination, strengthen ecological preservation and improve public services. Local governments need to merge poverty alleviation resources to make better use of them and take targeted measures to ensure that assistance reaches poverty-stricken villages and households. We will guide nongovernmental forces to participate in poverty alleviation. This year, we will lift more than ten million people out of poverty. We will continue to fight poverty and prevent poverty from being passed to future generations.
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