Household land tenure reform in China: Its impact on farming land use and agro-environment

Post-Mao rural reform has stimulated farmers' incentives for agricultural production. Yet, the short period of 15 years' land tenure, coupled with the ambiguous land property rights between collectives and individual households has also encouraged short-sighted decisions and the irresponsible use of land resources. Capital investment in farmland, and maintenance of irrigation facilities have been neglected. Farmers are ''digging'' soil and land resources for short and immediate benefit. In addition, low profit to grain production has the disadvantage of protecting arable land from being used for another purpose, also over-fragmented land with increased ridges and ditches has hampered--the function of irrigation and drainage and aggravated the impact of natural disaster As a consequence, all this has led to the degradation of China's agro-ecological environment. The situation is deteriorating. This paper describes the links between reformed land tenure systems and irresponsible farming as well as degraded agro-environment, some policy remedies are suggested. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.