CHINA: China has launched a plan to narrow the potentially destabilising income gap between rural and urban China, creating what Beijing has called "a new socialist countryside".
There are more than 800 million farmers and other rural residents in China, earning less than €1 a day. Their average annual income is around €325, which is less than one third of what people earn in the cities.
The new plan pledges billions of euro in funding and tax relief to help farmers. Reducing the urban-rural income gap would be a "long process, but the gravity of the problem has attracted serious attention from all sides", said Chen Xiwen, head of the ruling Communist Party's top rural policy think-tank. China's cabinet, the State Council, said the aim was to "mobilise the forces of all society to care for, support and join in building a new socialist countryside".
It allows for increased support for farmers, improved education and healthcare for rural families and an end to decades of discrimination against rural migrants, the government said.
The Communist Party is alarmed by the wave of rural anger sparked by loss of land and claims of inadequate compensation. There were 87,000 serious protests last year, a rise of almost 7 per cent on 2004, and most related to rural unrest.
Almost 200,000 hectares of farmland are disappearing every year through expanding cities and industrialisation. The reform plan could include some real grassroots changes. Mr Chen said the government may abandon its monopoly on the sale of arable land and provide a massive injection of funding and debt relief.
China's long-established rule that only the government holds the power to transfer farmland was unlikely to change, but farmers may eventually be allowed to sell land directly to developers, stopping corrupt officials from taking a chunk of the profits, which has raised farmers' hackles.
Former supreme leader Deng Xiaoping set up a system in the 1980s that allowed farmers to lease land from "collective" ownership by the village but didn't allow them to sell it.
"Eventually, we have to propose steadily reforming the land acquisition system itself," Mr Chen said. "Financial support for agriculture is crucial, and at present it appears to be clearly insufficient." He said there would be a nationwide audit of rural state debts. This year the government plans to give about €10 billion to grassroots agencies to make up for the revenue shortfall after agricultural tax was abolished in 2005.
"China's laws are improving but they are perhaps not enough to protect farmers' interests," said Li Ping, China representative for the Seattle-based Rural Development Institute.
"The central government is pretty firm on balancing development, and farmers are also anxious to have their rights. The problem is in the middle - the central government cannot rely on county or provincial governments to do what they want."