Raising agricultural production and rural incomes requires easier transfer of land and equitable public services

China's 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), which was approved at this year's session of the National People's Congress, lays out the country's strategy to develop the agriculture sector over the next five years.

The plan has a series of objectives for the development of agriculture and rural regions and these goals, if realized, will elevate China's rural economy to a new level.

The objectives can be divided into three parts: steadily increasing grain output; deeper reforms to provide equal public services for urban and rural residents; and new measures to raise the income of farmers.

According to the plan, in the coming five years, the grain production of China should realize a capacity increase of 50 million tons, which might prove difficult since there are several restricting factors.

With the uneven development of rural and urban areas, as well as the small portion of land every farmer has, the income received for toiling in the fields is lagging further and further behind that obtained from laboring in the cities. That huge gap has made many farmers give up agriculture to become migrant workers in the cities, thus leaving large areas of arable land unfarmed.

Agricultural production is increasingly concentrated in major agricultural regions, however, it is difficult to raise production efficiency and competitiveness because only about 10 percent of land is transferred, which makes it difficult to expand the scale of production, except for the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Northeast China. Increasing urbanization is also claiming farmland in these regions. Therefore it will be a formidable task for the country to meet its goal of increasing grain output by 50 million tons over the next five years.

Another objective of the plan is setting up a mechanism to offer equal public services to people in urban and rural regions. Public services include infrastructure and maintenance, basic social welfare, maintaining legal order, and providing other services to meet educational and cultural needs.