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SCIO press conference on China's priorities in 2022 for all-round rural revitalization

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China Daily:

This year's No. 1 document pointed out that strong measures shall be implemented to protect the arable land. What strong measures will be adopted regarding arable land construction and protection? Thank you.

Wu Hongyao:

This is a very important question. The arable land serves as the lifeline of grain production. General Secretary Xi Jinping has attached great importance to protecting arable land. He has made important instructions overt it on various occasions, noting that the requirements for the protection of arable land must be further clarified to ensure that China's 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) of farmland is a reliable figure and that all of the farmland is fertile. This year's No. 1 central document has paid more attention to the cultivation and protection of arable land, and it has rolled out a series of strong measures, which can be summarized as "ensuring quantity, improving quality, regulating the utilization and tapping into the potential."

To ensure quantity, we will firmly stick to the red line of 1.8 billion mu of arable land. Priorities lie in the following three aspects. First, we will draw redlines for designating arable land and permanent basic cropland, protecting the ecosystems and delineating boundaries for urban development. Second, we will specify the task quotas and targets that authorities at all levels need to achieve to protect arable land and permanent basic farmland, with every single piece of the land being marked with details. Third, some responsibility statements will be signed between central and local authorities, setting up specific targets for protecting arable land, which will be taken as mandatory indexes. Finally, we will ensure a stringent mechanism with a "one-vote veto" system and a lifelong accountability system.

In terms of improving quality, we will ramp up efforts to improve the quality of arable land. First, we will continue to take high-standard farmland construction as our priorities, aiming to complete the construction of 100 million mu of high-standard farmland and 400 million mu of high-efficiency water-saving irrigation areas. Moreover, we will also step up efforts to upgrade medium-and low-yield farmland to improve the fertility of arable land. Second, we will make great efforts to protect chernozem soils and further promote national chernozem soils protection projects to adopt conservation tilling techniques on 80 million mu of chernozem soils. Third, we will strengthen the entire process of regulation over balancing the occupation and replenishment of arable land, and ensure that the replenished land can be used in a long-term and stable manner, which will ensure that the capacity of the replenished land can be equivalent to those have been occupied.

In terms of regulating the utilization, we will strengthen the regulation over the use of arable land. First, those practices to turn the arable land into construction land shall be strictly limited. We will enhance law enforcement and regulation and punish those illegal practices of using the arable land for non-farming purposes. Second, we will hold tight control over converting arable land into other agricultural land. Third, we will ensure that the use of arable land should strictly follow specific priorities that they are supposed to be used. As Mr. Tang said, the arable land should be used primarily for the production of agricultural products such as grain, cotton, oil, sugar, and vegetables, as well as forage grass and fodder. The permanent basic farmland is mainly used for grain production, and all the high-standard farmland is theoretically used for grain production.

We will step up efforts to tap into the land potential to increase the quantity of arable land. We will support the practices of converting those qualified saline-alkali soil and other potential land resources into arable land in a proper and orderly manner. While protecting the ecological environment, those idle land and abandoned land suitable for development can be used to develop facility agriculture to break the resource constraints in terms of arable land, light, and heat. Thank you.