Nanning

Nanning — the capital city of China’s Guangxi province — is expected to see a boom in its property sector as farmers in rural areas cash in on new land policies and move to the cities.

Farmers can now swap their land use rights for a sum of money, which they can use to settle down in the provincial capital. The new policy is part of recent government measures to prop up China’s property sector.

Fu Wencai, chairman, Guangxi Nanning Dadi Property Development, said: ‘Deed tax has been cut to 1% for buyers of units that are smaller than 90 square meters. Banks have also cut the downpayment from 30%  to 20%. This makes it cheaper for rural residents here to own a property in the city.’

Stamp duty and land value-added tax have also been waived for individual buyers.

Given these incentives, industry watchers said farmers in the rural parts of the province may be drawn to buying property in Nanning.
Source: ChannelNews Asia

China farmer

China’s 700 million farmers have mostly missed out on the country’s economic boom. In 2006 Vice Premier Wen Jiabao correctly noted that rural poverty and land grabs that strip farmers of their land were a ‘key source of instability’ in China. Two years later, the situation is just as dire.

A raft of reforms recently announced may help. But if history is any guide, the reforms will provide only a superficial fix.

The main, still unaddressed, problem is farmers’ lack of full property rights. Unlike in cities, where owning property is now permitted, almost all farmland in China is owned by village collectives.

China farmers

Under a reform passed a decade ago, farmers ostensibly have 30-year land-use rights that allow them to till the soil. But corrupt local officials have little trouble stripping these rights through arbitrary ‘reallocations.’ These land grabs result in tens of thousands of protests in rural China every year.

The new set of reforms is being hailed by state media as a ‘landmark,’ but they still don’t give farmers the ownership rights. They do, however, make it easier for farmers to sell or transfer their land rights, which could unlock around $500 billion in land assets. They are also intended to make it harder for local officials to seize farmers’ land without compensation.

Much more HERE.
Source: Wall Street Journal Online

The latest report of Ministry of Land and Resources shows the country’s arable land fell by 40,000 hectares last year to 122 million hectares.

Admittedly the rate that slowed somewhat.

The farmland decrease rate has dropped by 0.22 percentage point compared with that the year before last. During that same period, 13,400 hectares of farmland were prevented from being illegally occupied. Which suggest that some of the measures the central government has adopted to protect arable hand have paid off.

Note that efforts to reclaim or cultivate 196,000 hectares of farm fields from wasteland and fallow land skew the figures somewhat.

If you compare these figures with the 403,000 hectares of land which had been occupied for construction in 2006 much has been done in checking illegal occupation of farmland. But at the same time, the land gained for farming in 2007 was much less than the 367,000 hectares that had been reclaimed in 2006.

The central government has said repeatedly that we can never afford to have less than 120 million hectares of farmland, a bottom line that will basically guarantee the food security of a population as large as 1.3 billion.

China is now a net importer of rice. It would appear that the 120 million hectare figure will be breached this year.
Source: China Daily

In a bid to control land use the government has banned urban Chinese from buying residential land or houses from farmers. An executive meeting of the State Council, China’s cabinet, warned that policies on rural land use will be strictly enforced.

State Councilors urged local governments to strengthen rural land management, improve the village and town planning and tighten control over the construction of farmers’ homes.

Farmers’ homes shall be built primarily on land that is idle or approved for housing and the policy that each rural household is allowed to have only one patch of housing land would be rigidly enforced.

Urban residents are forbidden from buying housing land or homes from farmers, and work units and individuals are prohibited from renting or occupying rural land for real estate development.

The meeting was presided over by Premier Wen Jiabao and State Councilors were ordered to see that government departments strictly examine land use plans and rein in sprawling urban projects.

China is facing a sharp conflict between land supply and demand, and the area of arable land, which had shrunk by 4.6 million mu from the end of last year to 1.827 billion mu, was only slightly above the minimum of 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) set by the government.

State Councilors said the government needed to set up the most stringent land management system, take strong moves against land waste and promote land saving and better planning.
Source: China.org.cn

According to the Ministry of Land and Resources almost a quarter of new land acquisitions in Chinese cities are illegal.

A survey using remote sensing satellite technology showed 22% of new acquisitions in 90 medium-sized and large cities were illegal.

The data collected from October 2005 to October 2006 also showed more than 80% of acquisitions were illegal in eight cities, where more than 16,000 hectares was illegally used.

Zhang Xinbao, director of the supervision bureau of the ministry, said about 51% of new land-use projects in the 90 cities were illegal and the figure was as high as 80% in 17 cities.

He said the illegal use of land was a growing problem in medium-sized cities, rural areas and in central and west China. He said the top 15 cities with the highest proportions of illegal use and acquisitions were mostly in central or west China.

As GDP growth played a crucial role in official promotion, local governments often acquiesced to illegal land use to attract investment.

Official figures show that investment in fixed assets in urban areas rose to RMB6.67 trillion in the first eight months of 2007, an increase of 26.7% over the same period last year. It may well be that the rural scene in our illustration is headed for extinction.
Source: People’s Daily Online