Land transfer should not be reduced to a "new enclosure movement"

When presiding over the seventh meeting of the Central leading Group for comprehensively deepening Reform on the 2nd, General Secretary Xi Jinping stressed the need to adhere to the three bottom lines: no change in the nature of public ownership of land, no breakthrough in the red line of cultivated land, and no damage to the interests of farmers.

To stick to the policy bottom line is to let farmers occupy the dominant position in agricultural modernization and truly reflect the country's intention of land reform. At present, in some places, due to the impulse of government achievements and the drive of capital for profit, the phenomenon that the circulation is out of shape and the farmers gradually lose their dominant position should be highly vigilant.

According to the data, the area of land transferred to enterprises in 2013 increased by 40% over the previous year. There are also hidden worries behind the data. "one or two hundred mu is nothing, only a few thousand mu, tens of thousands of mu can be regarded as modern agriculture." Under this one-sided understanding, some local governments blindly pursue the scale and proportion of circulation: some introduce "local policies" to attract investment, giving enterprises a large number of subsidies and incentives for land transfer; others simply rely on administrative orders directly, using indicators and tasks to artificially create falsely high land transfer rates.

The excessive introduction of these administrative will leads to the violation of farmers' will from time to time. The village organization should have been the spokesman of the villagers' interests, but when it found that it was profitable in the process of entering the land, it also changed from the original "passive receiver" to the "vanguard" of active promotion, which intensified the momentum of the "new enclosure movement".

Will companies really treat and use land more kindly than farmers? For part of the industrial and commercial capital involved in the circulation of agricultural land, there is often a lack of the mind to really manage agriculture.

The reporter interviewed at the grass-roots level and found that some enterprises often "do not care about wine": some come for "government subsidies". For example, an enterprise in Guangzhou has transferred nearly a thousand mu of land in Fengyang, Anhui Province in the name of growing vegetables. In seven years, no less government subsidies have been enjoyed, but not a single vegetable has been planted. Some enterprises come for the "land business". Enterprises transfer from farmers to land and wait for the appreciation, or change the land use in the name of leisure agriculture, temporary warehousing and so on. Generally speaking, when the profit-seeking capital enters the farmland, the better situation is that the land is "de-grain", while the bad situation is "non-agriculturalization". The impact on national food security and cultivated land protection must be paid great attention to.

The concentration of land transfer is a gradual process, which needs to be in line with the national conditions of agriculture. The "visible hand" of local governments should be more used to build land transfer platforms, rather than replacing the market and farmers. In this process, farmers must become the main body of land transfer. In particular, the new agricultural operators represented by large grain growers, family farms and farmers' cooperatives should be given more priority in the transfer of land. At present, the reward and subsidy tendency of some local governments in supporting agricultural policies of "emphasizing commerce and neglecting agriculture" and "replenishing the rich but not the poor" urgently needs to be adjusted.

Although the development of modern agriculture needs capital, unrestrained industrial and commercial capital is like a "wild horse", which needs to be equipped with a "beast". In the past two years, the central "No. 1 document" has proposed that there should be an access and supervision system for industrial and commercial enterprises to enter land circulation, but local exploration lags behind. From a realistic point of view, in the access of capital into the land, we should identify the operating capacity of enterprises; in the scope of business, we should guide to engage in agricultural prenatal and post-natal deep processing and other services, rather than directly competing with farmers for land.

Land transfer can not be turned around, and it is necessary to establish an exit mechanism and implement strict land use control. Only by doing these homework well can we ensure that the red line of cultivated land will not be broken and the interests of farmers will not be damaged.