More than 4.57 million hectares of farmland has been converted back into forest across China in the first half of this year, the State Forestry Administration announced yesterday in Beijing.

The amount accounts for 70.7 percent of the 6.47 million hectares of cultivated land that is planned to be converted this year.

 

In a bid to rebuild a sound environment, the program "Converting cultivated land into forests" was carried out in northwest China's Shaanxi and Gansu provinces and in southwest China's Sichuan Province in 1999.

 

It started to be implemented all over the country at the beginning of last year. The project offers annual subsidies of between 100 and 150 kilograms of food for each mu (0.067 hectares) of cultivated land the farmers have converted to forest. In addition, the farmers are paid 20 yuan (US$2.40) each year for each mu of converted land.

 

Between 1999 and 2002, the government invested more than 23.5 billion yuan (US$2.8 billion) in converting nearly 8 million hectares of cultivated land back to forests.

 

(China Daily July 28, 2003)