Dr. Aihemaitijiang Rouzi

Advisor Agricultural Sustainability (DCZ)

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council jointly released the Document No. 1 on 22 February 2022, also entitled “Opinions of the State Council on Comprehensively Promoting the Key Work of Rural Revitalization in 2022”.

According to this year’s document:

• Two bottom-line tasks are clarified: ensuring the national food security and preventing the large-scale return to poverty;
• Three key tasks: rural development, rural construction, and rural governance;
• Promoting new progress in the rural revitalization and modernization of agriculture and rural areas at a new pace.

Here are the highlights of the document:

1. Food security

• Ensure the food security by keeping cropland area stable and sustaining grain production above 650 million tons.
• Strictly maintain the cropland area of 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectare) as in previous years.
• Promote the establishment of a “national food security production belt”.
• Improve the water use efficiency of agriculture along the Yellow river and keep the production stable.
• Promote the corn and soybean mixed plantation in Yellow river, Huaihe river, Northwest and South-eastern regions; expand the soybean-grain rotation in North-eastern China; In water scarce part of Heilongjiang convert the rice plantation into soybean; develop the winter rape areas along the Yangtze river.
• Sustain the support policy for the pork production and prevent the large-scale drop in production.
• Ensure the supply of vegetables to big and mid-size cities, promote the vegetable production in the North and improve vegetable transport from the South to the North.
• Implement proper minimum price and subsidies for rice, wheat and corn and ensure to cover the costs of production of these crops.
• Establish an agricultural supply chain early warning system.
• Establish 100 million mu of high-quality farmlands and increase the accumulated water-efficient irrigated farmlands into 400 million mu.
• Realize the protection of black soil croplands areas to 80 million mu.
• Initiate a third national soil survey.
• Intensify the research on mid to long term impact of climate change on agriculture.

2. Preventing the large-scale return to poverty

• Implement social benefits and health insurance help mechanism to the poverty prone regions in a timely manner.
• Expand the rural credit investment and insurance system to counties which is the focus of national rural revitalization efforts.

3. Rural development and construction and rural governance

• Promote village/ rural area tourism and ecommerce.
• Promote livestream sale and logistics of agricultural products.
• Improve the digital skills of rural residents.
• Accelerate the early child hood education in rural areas.
• Protection of women and children's rights in rural areas.
• Establish the rural revitalization excellence reward mechanism.

4. New in rural revitalization and modernization of agriculture and rural areas

• Establish various rural talent initiatives to bring young talents to the rural areas.
• Further extend the experimental counties for second round of household responsibility system of 30 years.
• Expand the experimental areas for rural residential housing reform.
• Initiate the national biological breeding big project.
• implement an action plan on seed industry, promoting germplasm collection and enhancing intellectual property (IP) protection in the sector.

Source:

http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2022-02/22/content_5675035.htm