China announced a policy on Sunday promoting and standardizing the transfer of the right to use farmland from rural citizens to commercial entities.

Under the new policy, rural residents are given more freedom of transferring the land they have contracted, while their right to collectively own the land remains unchanged, the People's Daily China reported.

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Most of China's rural lands are owned collectively by people working on it. However, as the country becomes urbanized, many people started to migrate to bigger cities to seek for higher paying jobs. As a result, many of the lands are left unattended, which prompted China in 2008 to start permitting farmers to rent, transfer, and merge the land they have contracted.

The new policy, therefore, aims to lead to the formation of mechanisms to make the transfer more standardized while at the same time better protecting the land owners' rights. It is looking to reform landholding rights for rural residents as it promotes urbanization and efficacy on using large-scale farms, safeguard property rights, manage land circulation, increase farmers' incomes, and enhance modern agriculture development, according to Reuters.

Government offices at different levels, on the other hand, are tasked to guard against forced transfers, to ensure that the land transfer will not result to decrease in arable land or grain output, and to guarantee that farmlands are not used for non-farming purposes under the guise of land transfers.

The recommendations from the State Council and the Communist Party's general office call for the separation of land-use rights, contract rights, and operating rights to allow farmers keep their land rights while leasing the land out to others to operate, state-backed Xinhua News reported as cited by Reuters. 

The announcement further stipulates that China should complete a list of rural land ownership and enhance supervision and risk-prevention measures for commercial leasing of farmlands.

Tagsfarmland, Land use, farmland use rights, land rights