Satellites Put Small Farms on China’s Map

YANGWANG, CHINA — The bare light bulbs, unheated rooms and elderly residents of the whitewashed village of Yangwang in eastern China make it seem an unlikely place for an experiment in cutting-edge satellite technology.

But the tiny village in Anhui Province was home to a pilot project that for the first time mapped farmers’ land, putting Yangwang on the front line of China’s efforts to build a modern agricultural sector that can underpin the country’s food security — a policy priority for the Communist Party.

The mapping is a tedious but crucial task to make farmers feel more secure about their rights so that they become more willing to merge fields into larger-scale farms. It could also help protect them from land grabs by local officials, a leading cause of rural unrest.

“If we don’t do this now, and the older generation passes away, the next generation won’t know which plot is whose,” said Pan Shengyu, who oversaw one of Anhui’s land-titling efforts. “Soon no one will be able to figure it out.”

China’s annual rural policy document, released last week, calls for farmland titles to be defined nationwide during the next five years. It is a technical challenge that could cost $16 billion.

In another move aimed at the population in the countryside, Beijing unveiled sweeping tax reforms Tuesday to narrow a wide income gap between the urban elite and the rural poor.

Reforms in the 1980s assigned farmland to households, with formal ownership reserved for the village collective. But land certificates are imprecise at best, and more than half of rural households lack documentation — leaving possession dependent upon villagers’ knowledge and officialdom’s whims.

The use of satellite positioning to map tiny plots of land in Yangwang has been followed in other pilot projects in Anhui and elsewhere, with the intent to eventually expand the program nationally.

Most Chinese farmers till about eight mu, or a little more than an acre or half a hectare, per household. Each household’s land tends to be subdivided into five or more plots.

Anhui Province alone has 100 million plots of less than one mu each. Throughout China, well over 1 billion plots have never been officially mapped.

The satellite mapping will replace current deeds that often rely on descriptions like “Yang’s field borders Wang’s to the east.” Such colloquial formulations make villagers reluctant to remove dirt mounds that separate the plots for fear that they will no longer be able to identify what is theirs.

The mapping information will be compiled in searchable, centralized registries, allowing farmers to confirm what they own and giving officials better land-use information.

China legalized land transfers in 2008 to formally allow villagers to aggregate land. Most Chinese agriculture remains small-scale, however, which does not facilitate investments that would increase productivity enough to feed a growing urban population.

But those who rent large tracts of land are more likely to invest for the long term if the transfer is documented and legal, a World Bank study found last year.

And farming families who feel secure in their land rights send more members out to find paid work, the study found. Monthly incomes for migrant laborers in cities exceed the amount earned in a year from a one-mu plot.

More precise ownership titles mean “people feel more secure,” said Jian Zongzhu, 72, who lives in Yangwang. “Everyone’s gone out to work, but with a certificate you know the land is yours, no one can take it away and you can claim it back if you want. That’s important to common people because our life comes from the land.”

Assigning title is painstaking work that involves correlating satellite pictures with village records, issuing certificates and creating databases to register and search for land transfers.

A flat field in northern China may have been subdivided many times. In the south, hilly terrain increases the satellites’ margin of error. Everywhere, trees may hide field boundaries.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/technology/satellites-put-small-farms-on-chinas-map.html?partner=rss&emc=rss