Sunday October 12, 2:37 PM
China's communists set to approve key land reforms
China's ruling Communist Party was expected Sunday to approve a major economic reform plan that would let farmers trade and mortgage their right to land and bolster the nation's food security.
The move is part of a wider package of reforms aimed at reducing a gaping rural-urban income gap that has expanded during 30 years of capitalist market policies.
They are seen as key to an economic plan to be approved on the closing day of an annual meeting here attended by up to 500 members of the party's central and disciplinary committees and other key officials, and chaired by President Hu Jintao.
Under the new policies, farmers would be able to trade, rent and mortgage their land use rights for profit in a land transaction market, Dang Guoying, a rural scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the China Daily newspaper.
"The move will speed up the country's urbanisation by bringing more farmers to the cities with the big farm contractors promoting modern farming in rural areas," it quoted Dang as saying.
Policies approved by the party traditionally are placed before the National People's Congress, China's parliament, for approval when it holds its annual session the following March.
Building large-scale industrial farms is seen as key to China's long-held policy of remaining self-sufficient in grain production and being able to feed its population of 1.3 billion people, state press say.
Most of China's farm plots are small and held individually at a time when hundreds of millions of farmers are leaving the land to seek better lives in the nation's quickly developing urban centres.
According to China's constitution all land is owned by the state, so the land reforms under discussion are not expected to result in private ownership of land, observers note.
"Reviving the rural economy is key to China's next stage of development," the Outlook Weekly magazine quoted Chang Xueze, a professor with the National Development and Reform Commission, as saying.
"It is both the new focus and the bottleneck of our country's next round of reforms."
The reform package could also include adjustments to China's macro-economic policy during the global financial crisis and amid a slowing in export growth, according to the official National Business Daily.
The rural focus of the ruling party meeting is also a nod to this year's 30th anniversary of China's opening and reform policies, which began in 1978 with policies returning collectivised farmlands back to individual farmers.
The 1978 reforms ended decades of China's disastrous experimentation with Maoist-style collectivisation that left the nation impoverished and backward.
While the market reforms have led to spectacular economic growth in the world's most populous nation, the income gap between China's 800 million or so farmers and the increasingly prosperous urban areas has also become a huge headache for policymakers.