The government is set to launch a massive reform of forests
owned by the State and village collectives. The forests are to be
managed by individual farmers, contractors, and overseas
investors.
Like the agriculture sector in the 1980s, the reform will
separate management rights from ownership. Village collectives will
continue to hold ownership rights but not management.
The reform plan, a State Forestry Administration (SFA) official
told China Daily, has already been submitted to the
national leadership for approval.
The reform of the country's forests, which occupy 280 million
hectares and is three times the size of the farmlands, is seen as
the biggest reform in China.
It follows the reform of farmlands in the early 1980s and of
State-owned enterprises in the 1990s.
SFA declined to give a timetable, but Jia Zhibang, the SFA
director, said previously the reform would be completed nationwide
by 2010.
Regional governments are already working on the reform. Some of
their pilot projects have been in existence for several years,
according to the SFA official who talked to China
Daily.
What they need, essentially, is a "symbolic endorsement" from
the central government, he said.
Authorities in Shaanxi Province have already decided to
allocate 70 percent of the province's forest resources to the
management of individual farmers - some contracts running for 70
years.
Liu Xiongying, SFA's press officer, said the reform plan had
drawn extensively from local pilot projects. "Our basic target is
to diversify forest ownership."
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) hopes the
reform will boost agricultural productivity and forestry
development, and in the process, benefit the country both
environmentally and economically.
Du Ying, an agricultural expert and deputy minister of the NDRC,
recently urged local governments to view the reform as "high
priority".
He suggested that management rights should cover a period of
60-70 years, as compared with 30 years for farmlands.
Almost half of China's rural population lives in mountainous
areas and depends on the forests for a living. And despite the
rapid economic changes in the coastal cities, many of them remain
poor.
The NDRC official said he was sure the reform would help lift
them out of poverty, as shown by the pilot projects in Fujian and Jiangxi provinces. The forests are now
generating a high income for farmers.
(China Daily August 16, 2007)