Mass participation rural protests in China fell "markedly" in 2006 and would continue to drop if government officials worked hard to deal with the concerns of farmers. The top advisor to the government on rural policy, Chen Xiwen, delivered this message yesterday. ?

 

"Overall the volume of rural mass incidents in 2006 clearly fell from the previous year," said Chen, director of the Office of Central Rural Work Leading Group, at a press conference hosted by the State Council Information Office in Beijing.

 

Chen revealed that he estimated the decline in protests was close to 20 percent. There'd been 23,000 such incidents on the Chinese mainland last year with less than half in the countryside.

 

Nearly half of the rural protests, including petitions and riots, were triggered by illegal land seizures or expropriation and the remainder sparked by farmers' discontent over village finances and pollution, said Chen. ?

 

To deal with the problems the State Council had ordered local governments to raise compensation for farmers who lost land for development projects. The State Council also demanded that vocational training be provided for them and re-employment services made available as well as bringing them under the social security umbrella, Chen explained. ?

 

The State Council has also started to hold provincial governments responsible for diverting farmland to other uses in excess of quotas, Chen added.

 

China had to do whatever it could to prevent farmland from shrinking below the 120-million-hectare warning line to ensure food security in years ahead, Chen told China Daily. The farmland acreage was 122.1 million hectares at the end of 2005.

 

There were ways to complain but the key was to ensure that the channels to do so were clear and government officials handle issues concerning the interests of farmers strictly in line with statutes and policies, Chen added. If their interests were not prejudiced they'd hold fewer grudges, he added. ??

 

"It's still the case that issues that arose several years ago have not been properly resolved or not resolved to farmers' satisfaction and so they're still unhappy and continue to complain," he said.

 

Chen said government officials should not neglect farmers' petitions on the pretext that they are trivial. Instead they should make every effort to resolve the problems promptly.

 

Relations between farmers and local officials had improved following the phasing out of the centuries-old agricultural tax and the building of a market system for grain distribution. In the past they'd been strained largely because rural officials were responsible for collecting the revenue and grain directly from farmers, Chen said.

 

(China Daily January 31, 2007)