Can China's Rural Land Policy Reforms Solve its Farmland Dilemma?

Minghao Li, Wendong Zhang () and Dermot Hayes

Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications from Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University

Abstract: The scarcity of arable land is a defining feature of Chinese agriculture. In 2015, China fed 18.9 percent of the world's population with only 8.5 percent of the world's arable land. Furthermore, the limited agricultural land resource in China is distributed to 231 million households, resulting in an average farm size of only 0.96 acres per household, and even such small farms are usually scattered in several separate plots. Therefore, China faces two challenges: (a) preserving the quantity and quality of its arable land amid rapid urbanization; and, (b) consolidating land to increase agricultural productivity. China's recent rural land reforms on these two aspects have implications not only for China, but the entire world.

Date: 2018-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_review/article/?a=78 Full Text (text/html)
https://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_review/pdf/winter-2018.pdf Full Issue Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ias:cpaper:apr-winter-2018-4

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications from Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().