The Ministry of Agriculture held a ceremony and work conference in Beijing on Tuesday to celebrate the 20th anniversary of China's rural household survey system.

According to information released at the conference, a total of 300 million pieces of original data have been collected over the last 20 years.

Vice Agriculture Minister Yi Chengjie told reporters that the rural household survey system has enabled the government to obtain important first hand information through extensive door-to-door sampling. Since its establishment in 1984, the survey system has gathered and monitored long term information relating to farmers' income, the outflow of rural superfluous labor, farmers' grain reserves, and technological information for the rural market.

Future monitoring and surveying will focus on the following: farmers' income growth, the movement of rural labors, rural infrastructure development, the adjustment of the country's agricultural structure, the development of rural social welfare and the enforcement of agricultural policies. Of these, priority will be given to special surveys of farmers' income and the outflow of rural labor seeking employment.

The survey system has developed a network of information, drawing samples from more than 360 villages, 24,000 households and more than 600 village-level enterprises across 346 counties and cities in 31 provinces, autonomous regions and cities.

About 2,000 indices on the rural economy and society are sampled annually.

(China.org.cn by Wind Gu September 29, 2005)