Deforestation and Rural Poverty in China: Essences and Countermeasures

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Deforestation and Rural Poverty in China
Essences and Countermeasures

• Han HongyunChina Academy for Rural Development,
  Zhejiang University

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0. Outline of the paper

• This paper is structured into following sections
  
• New trends of rural poverty are analyzed
• The essence of rural poverty is given
• Major strategies and policies for environmental
  recovery are summarized
• Brief conclusions are drawn.

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The purpose of the paper
Since the founding of the Peoples Republic of
China in 1949, and especially since the end of
the 1970s, China has made tremendous achievement
in poverty alleviation. However, the collective
gain of world poor reduction still depends on
China due to its huge population. To make
policies effective, it is critical to know why
the poor live in poverty, clearer and more
transparent analyses on the reasons of poverty
are essential prerequisites of any development
policy that puts poverty reduction at its heart.
This assessment is expected to aid the planning
of policies alleviating poverty in the World,
especially in developing countries though an
analysis of the relationship between land
degradation and rural poverty.
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The stages of help-the-poor program in China

• The First Stage--Structural Reform Promotes
  Poverty Relief (1978-1985)
• The Second Stage Large-Scale Development-oriented
  Poverty Relief Drive (1986-1993)
• The Third Stage Tackling Key Problems of Poverty
  Relief (1994-2000)
• The fourth stage New Century Rural Poverty
  Alleviation Plan for the period of 200110.

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1. New trends of rural poverty
Table 1 Poverty line and the number in China
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Table 2 Poverty population and the reduction of
the poor in rural areas
Source Poverty monitoring report of rural China
2006,rural Survey department of national bureau
of statistics, p.16.
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Geographic distribution of rural poverty in China
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Distribution of the poor
There are the less developed and most poverty
prone western regions of the country .
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2. The essence of rural poverty in China
2. 1 Poor land quality Soil Erosion Salinisation
Desertification
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Soil Erosion
China is one of the most seriously soil-eroded
countries in the world. The existing area of soil
erosion in China is 3.67 million square
kilometers, it is more than 3 times higher than
the average for the world of about 12.3 (Huang,
2000). In upland sections of the interior
provinces of northern, northwestern and
southwestern China, land itself is of such poor
quality that it is not possible to achieve
subsistence levels of crop production (Piazza and
Liang, 1998). The Loess Plateau, located in the
upper-middle reaches of the Yellow River of
northern China, is facing serious soil erosion
largely caused by cultivation of marginal lands
and destruction of natural vegetation (Lu and
Ittersum, 2004). China has 6.07 million hectares
of land with a slope of more than 25 degrees,
over 70 of which is located in the western
region. Eroded areas in the western region are
estimated to make up 80 of the country's total
eroded land (Glantz et al., 2001).
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Salinisation
Salinization is the build-up of salt within the
soil and is mainly a problem associated with
poorly designed and/or managed irrigation
development in arid and semiarid zones, and it is
also a natural phenomenon. The area of salinized
land is estimated at 82 to 100 million hectares,
including about seven to eight million hectares
of cropland. The area of salinized cropland
increased by about 10 over the 20 year-period
ending in 1996 but the rate declined from 1.1 in
the 1970s to 0.65 in the 1980s and 0.3 in the
1990s (Huang, 2000). Most of the salinized
cropland in China is located in three
geographical regions the water-scarce and ground
water irrigated areas in the North China Plain
and Northwest Dry Region (30 of the total), the
Extended Loess Plateau (26 ) and the Northeast
(16 ) (World Bank, 2001).
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Desertification
The total desertified area has more than doubled
since the 1950s, and the rate of desertification
had accelerated during both the 1980s and the
1990s (Jia, 2003). An estimated 331 million
hectares - roughly a third of Chinas total area
- is prone to desertification. Of this total,
desertification is occurring on about 262 million
hectares, with an annual expansion of 2.46
million hectares (ADB, 2003). According to the
World Bank (2001), China has the highest ratio of
actual-to-potential desertified land in the
world. The problem is mainly restricted to five
provinces/autonomous regions Xinjiang (42 of
the national total), Inner Mongolia (34 ), Gansu
(9 ), Tibet (7 pre cent), and Qinghai (5 )
(World Bank 2001 Jiang, 2001).
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Distribution of land degradation
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2. 2 Causes for land degradation
2.2.1 Deforestation and soil erosion Table 3 The
coverage rate of forest in different regions ()
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2.2.2 Degraded grassland and soil erosion
Table 4 Extent of grassland degradation in China,
1998
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2.3 Deforestation and rural poverty
There is a strong linkage between land
degradation and rural poverty. Almost 90 of
rural people living in poverty are located in
areas suffering from land degradation (ADB,
2003). The loss of vegetation has resulted in
land degradation, which induces increasingly
frequent flood, drought and sandstorm events, and
causes eco-environmental degradation in large
areas of land. Most provinces in China have been
affected by land degradation, with an annual soil
loss estimated at 5 billion tons (ADB, 2003).
Total direct costs of land degradation at the
national level are estimated at US7.7 billion
per year in 1999, 4 of GDP, while indirect
costs are around US31 billion a year (Berry,
2003).
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3. Major strategies and policies for
environmental recovery
4. 1 Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation
Project 4.2 The Great West Development
Program 4.3 The Natural Forest Protection Program
(NFPP) 4.4 The Conversion of Cropland to Forests
and Grasslands Program (CCFGP)
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3.1 Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project
The successful implementation of Chinas Loess
Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project,
launched in 1994 and completed in 2002. The
primary objective of the project is to increase
agricultural production and incomes on 1,560,000
hectares of land in the Loess Plateau in nine
tributary watersheds of the Yellow River. A
secondary objective is to reduce sediment inflows
to the Yellow River.
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3.2 The Great West Development Program
Since the mid 1990s, the development of Chinas
western provinces has been a priority of the
national development strategy. Through the Great
West Development Program, the sustainable
development concept was introduced into the rural
development. The main policy options of the
program focus on (1) poverty alleviation through
the promotion of local sector development (2)
sustainable management of natural resources and
(3) provision of an improved infrastructure and
local institutional capacities. Protecting
vegetation of pastoral land in the up-reaches of
the Yellow River and Yangtze River has also
become a key issue.
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3.3 The Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP)
The NFPP was initiated in 1998 to counter the
impacts of deforestation. The program featured a
logging ban on the 30.38 million hectares of
currently existing natural forest area in the
upper reaches of the Yangtze and upper and middle
reaches of the Yellow River. Measures to
counteract the economic and social problems
resulting from the logging ban include
reassignment of forestry workers provision of
central government subsidies to local governments
whose revenues have been impacted tax reductions
and subsidies to forest enterprises for
reorientation of activities and basic living
allowances for laid-off workers
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3.4 The Conversion of Cropland to Forests and
Grasslands Program
Another major undertaking by the Chinese
Government was the Conversion of Cropland to
Forests and Grasslands Program implemented in
late 1999. The planting of annual crops and the
grazing of livestock on deforested lands with a
slope of over 25 degrees have led to accelerated
rates of soil erosion in China. There is a
reported total of 6.07 million hectares of
agricultural land on slopes of over 25 degrees,
of which over 70 per cent is located in the
Yangtze River and Yellow River Basins in the West
.
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4. Lessons and implications
4.1 Incomplete land tenure definition 4.2 Lack of
coordination among sectoral policies 4.3
Insufficient law enforcement
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4.1 Incomplete land tenure
In the rural sector, land reform was carried out
with the introduction of the Household
Responsibility System. Under this pattern of land
tenure, farmers are assigned land use rights
instead of rights to the land asset itself. Land
is owned by farmers collectively rather than
individually. Farmers land use rights are
weakened by the State procurement system and
distorted prices. Farmers are prohibited from
transferring their land use rights. Recognizing
the incomplete land tenure issue, the Chinese
Government adopted a new land use law, namely the
Rural Land Contracting Law, which was approved by
the National Peoples Congress in August 2002.
The new law reaffirms that farmers are entitled
to 30-year rights to use the land. For
forestland, the contracting term is 30 70 years
and can be extended for special tree species.
Under the new law, land readjustments according
to changes in family size or other reasons are
prohibited. Farm households are entitled to
transfer, exchange, and assign their land use
rights to other households (Rural Development
Institute, 2002).
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4.2 Lack of coordination among sectoral policies
The natural resource management agenda is
complex. It has involved multiple administrative
agencies. In China, natural resources have been
managed by many different departments. Policy
making, implementation, and coordination related
to natural resource management, conservation, and
desertification control has become the mandate of
a range of different departments, including the
Ministry of Land and Resources, the Ministry of
Agriculture, the State Forestry Administration,
and the Ministry of Water Resources. It is common
for different sectors to have sector-specific
initiatives in their development strategies.
Sometimes policies are not able to complement
each other and there are overlaps, gaps and even
contradictions. The lack of coordination among
sectoral policies and the failure to maximise
synergies and adjudicate disputes regarding the
work of different agencies have adversely
affected sustainable natural resources management.
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4.3 Insufficient law enforcement
Despite the complex system of legislative and
policy tools already in place, compliance with
environmental and natural resources management
regulations remains low in China. The vagueness
of standard in many laws and regulations, coupled
with the lack of a comprehensive enforcement
regime has led to a situation where many
environmental and natural resources laws still
reflect deals cut between different sectors. In
addition, loopholes in existing laws and
regulations allow malpractice and mismanagement
to thrive. For instance, according to Chinas
Constitution, farmers collectively own the
farmland. The government is authorized to use the
land for the sake of the public interest.
However, the current Land Management Law fails to
define what constitutes the public interest.
Furthermore, there is no strict stipulation on
how to secure farmers interests when land
transfers occur.
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Conclusions
Land use represents a critical intersection of
the economy and the environment, the existing
evidence shows that land degradation is serious
and appears to be worsening. The Government has
recently initiated a number of key ecological
programs to protect the fragile natural
environment and eradicate rural poverty. However,
the policy goals have not been adequately
translated into concrete actions on the ground.
Last but by no means the least, policy
alternatives should be extensively explored. One
distinctive feature of the existing policy
programs is that they are mostly administrative
measures, future emphasis should be put on
exploring alternative policy instruments,
including economic incentives, by applying the
principle of the new institutional economics. In
addition to the reform of institutions, some
kinds of support from governments are necessary
for the poor to get rid of poverty and the
sustainable development of less developed
regions.
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Thank you for your attention and patience !