How China’s farmland-reclamation campaign is driving aggressive crop expansions and land-use crackdowns
- Increasing the acreage of major foodstuffs has become a central priority for Chinese leadership in ensuring that enough food is available in the face of worrisome threats
- But an aggressive acreage expansion is raising questions over soil sustainability and the earnings of farmers forced to grow essential crops instead of lucrative ones
Tucked between a hillside village and a highway in eastern China’s Zhejiang province lies a vast field growing one of the world’s most important oilseed crops.
Thin and tall rapeseed plants – from which canola oil is derived – span about 60 hectares (148 acres) of newly reclaimed farmland in suburban Hangzhou. And in each of the field’s four corners are piles of hog manure waiting to be applied as much-needed fertiliser.
It wasn’t that long ago when part of this field laid idle while another portion was divided up for use among villagers to grow vegetables and garden plants. But in the past year, the entirety of the field has been contracted to a local agricultural company to grow grains and oilseeds under a government-led initiative.
For Fang Xueyong, the company’s owner, it wasn’t a profitable deal, at least not in the short term. For starters, he pointed to the land’s suboptimal fertility after having gone years without fertiliser that supplies crops with nutrients and improves the soil structure.
“Productivity will be 30 per cent lower than in my other fields,” he said, “but the government wants to increase the acreage of major foodstuffs, so we just responded to the call.”
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The agricultural undertaking is part of a nationwide farmland-reclamation campaign that has been rolled out to support greater crop yields at a time of rising food insecurity, owing largely to strained ties with the West and the effects of the Ukraine war.
Local governments across China are turning abandoned land, orchards and green spaces into cropland, but the subsequent expectations are a tall order for many farmers tasked with sowing and cultivating the soil.
In recent decades, China’s total arable land had been decreasing amid rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, but the trend has been reversing for the past two years amid the government’s tough measures to curb land loss, according to the results of the most recent land-use survey released by the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) in March.
I guess the authorities have their own concerns. We can’t rely on others for food if there’s a war or something, can we?
There were 127.6 million hectares of arable land in the country by the end of last year – a slight increase of 86,000 hectares from a year earlier, the ministry said.
“In the past, we were encouraged to grow whatever was profitable. Now we’re not allowed to grow non-food crops,” Fang said, referring to those used for commercial purposes rather than consumption.
Most local farmers opt to plant bamboo and strawberries. Each mu (0.067 hectares, 0.16 acres) of the former could net them an annual income of more than 10,000 yuan (US$1,444), and for strawberries they can earn about 20,000 yuan, according to one of his employees, Fang Xueming. In comparison, growing rapeseed and rice on a same-size parcel can yield just 3,000 yuan a year.
“I guess the authorities have their own concerns. We can’t rely on others for food if there’s a war or something, can we? So, they’re stressing the importance of self-reliance,” said Fang Xueyong. “There’s a need to increase the size of arable land, as it dropped quickly in recent years.”
China’s grain output hit 687 million metric tonnes in 2022, a slight increase from the previous year and a record high, according to official data.
In the past five years, the country has added 30.4 million hectares of high-standard cropland, former premier Li Keqiang said in March in his last government work report.
And in just the last few weeks, the MNR has convened a series of meetings involving city-level authorities, instructing them to avoid using farmland for non-agricultural purposes.
In a typical example, Bijie, a poverty-stricken city in Guizhou province, was criticised for its “increasing” construction of houses on farmland, and for illegally using land for various types of tourism projects that “were widely scattered”.
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President Xi Jinping has publicly reiterated the importance of maintaining farmland acreage in the past couple of years, and he singled out the use of farmland for landscaping and afforestation.
He was particularly upset about green belts – areas of open land on which building is restricted – that spanned long stretches of roads, railways and rivers, according to comments published in April 2022 in the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Qiushi.
“We do have a lot of land, but it’s a scarce resource when compared with 1.4 billion people. We need land to build cities, develop industries, and protect the ecology. There must be a priority after careful calculations and strict budgeting,” he was quoted as saying. “All provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities must retain the size of farmland for food. No more declines.”
Thirteen local governments were named and shamed by the MNR earlier this month for disobeying the official directives, according to a statement on the ministry’s WeChat account.
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In a leading case, Xinhe county in Hebei province was ordered to abandon an ongoing project that had allocated more than 13 hectares (33 acres) of arable land for landscaping purposes, and it was forced to convert the area back into cropland.
And in Chengdu, Sichuan province, the world’s longest greenway project, dubbed the Tianfu Greenway, recently came under fire for reclaiming about 6,700 hectares of farmland along the 16,900km belt.
Meanwhile, in suburban Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, the entire Qiaosi subdistrict is being relocated to better allocate land resources. A portion of the land freed up from the relocation initiative will be turned into farmland, according to the Hangzhou Daily.
A source within the Qiaosi government said authorities are working on a plan to turn the land currently occupied by local residents’ former homes into arable land.
“There is a lot of construction waste to be cleared, and we’ll need to improve the soil. So, it will be a long-term project,” he said.
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And in a rural part of Zhejiang’s Jiaxing city, authorities are similarly looking for new sources of farmland. But their sights have been primarily set on converting green areas covered by trees or other plants, rather than land occupied by real estate or industrial parks, according to Zhai Xiaoqing, a member of a villagers’ committee.
“After all, the economy still counts on industry and real estate,” he said. “Agriculture is still a low-margin sector, although it may be something nice to talk about at the moment.”
In his village and nearby areas, non-agricultural facilities on leisure farms have been torn down to make room for crops, and farmers who used to grow nursery stock were encouraged to lease the land to agricultural cooperatives for the large-scale planting of rice and wheat.
But this is not generating economic benefits for local residents, as global and domestic grain prices have been declining in the past year. “It won’t be a sustainable measure if the participants can’t make money,” Zhai said.
The official slogan is ‘10,000 yuan earned for each mu’, but I guess it will be more like 7,000 yuan this year
Ma Wenfeng, a senior analyst with Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultancy, said China might need to adjust its approach. Instead of increasing acreage, there is a more urgent need to raise agricultural efficiency and productivity to generate greater yields.
“Assuming the size of arable land remains unchanged, our combined annual production of grains and oilseeds would grow by a third if we improved efficiency to the level of advanced agricultural countries,” he said.
Fang Xueming, the worker responsible for the 60-hectare rapeseed field in Zhejiang, said he plans on breeding softshell turtles in rice fields after the coming rapeseed harvest.
Intensive rice-turtle aquafarming has been found to produce high yields of rice without negatively affecting water and soil quality. However, he still expects revenue to fall well short of what the government has been touting.
“The official slogan is ‘10,000 yuan earned for each mu’, but I guess it will be more like 7,000 yuan this year,” he said.
