Chinese farmers will be allowed to trade, lease out and transfer their land rights for profit, according to a landmark agricultural policy document released by the government on Sunday.
The policy, approved a week earlier by the ruling Communist Party, is part of a reform push aimed at reducing a gaping rural-urban income gap and maintaining the nation''s food security amid growing demand.
It calls for a wide-ranging effort to improve the rights and livelihoods of China''s vast masses of peasant farmers, with the aim of ending rural poverty and doubling the per capita rural income of 4,140 yuan (591 dollars) by 2020.
China must "strengthen the agricultural foundation, increase farmers'' incomes, ensure their rights and interests... and properly deploy the enthusiasm, motivation and creativity of farmers," the policy document said.
A key element of the policy will be to allow farmers new rights to dispose of their land as they see fit. The document calls for "allowing farmers to subcontract, rent, exchange, transfer and engage in joint stock ownership methods of land rights transfers," but contains few details of how such a system would work.
It did say market mechanisms to be set up later would safeguard the interests of farmers, amid fears that the reforms could result in peasants being duped out of their land for little compensation.
Those systems "must not change the agricultural use of the land or harm the land contract rights of farmers," it added. The package was approved at an annual meeting, chaired by President Hu Jintao, of up to 500 members of the party''s central and disciplinary committees and other key officials on October 12.
Details have been reported by the official state press but the actual document itself was not released until Sunday.
All land in China is officially owned by the state, so the reforms were not expected to result in private land ownership. The new push comes amid increasing alarm among Chinese policy-makers over a growing rich-poor gap that has hurt rural farmers.
When Deng Xiaoping inaugurated a move away from Mao Zedong''s disastrous collectivisation schemes in 1978, one of the key steps was to return agricultural lands back to individual farmers.
Those reforms have led to spectacular economic growth in China''s coastal manufacturing regions and urban centres, but despite getting more control over land, China''s 800 million or so farmers have been largely left behind.
One aim of the reform will be to encourage the development of large-scale industrial farms as a way of maximising the use of arable land and keeping China - with its 1.3 billion mouths to feed - self-sufficient in grain production, state press have said.
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 cities.
The policy would include "stringent" systems for protecting arable land to avoid having farms falling into the hands of developers or others for non-agricultural use.
Government data issued earlier this year showed the amount of farmland in China shrank closer to critical levels in 2007 as the country''s property boom saw farms siphoned off for use as industrial zones or residential areas.
The amount of arable land fell to 121.73 million hectares in 2007. The Chinese government has warned for years of a critical situation should the amount of farming land fall to 120 million hectares (300 million acres), and has cracked down on illegal land grabs by developers and local officials.