China struggles with "high standard" farmland upgrades

China's latest plan to upgrade the quality of its farmland was announced by China's Xinhua News Agency March 30, 2025. The new target is to create 1.35 billion mu (90 million hectares) of "high standard farmland" by 2030. (China's total amount of arable land is 1.93 billion mu, or 128.6 million hectares.)

The new plan implements a decree issued in the 2023 "Document No. 1" that all "permanent basic farmland" be converted to high standard farmland. The 2024 and 2025 "Documents No. 1" also included paragraphs directing officials to build high standard farmland.

The "high standard farmland" initiative aims to overhaul village-wide parcels of land by leveling fields, consolidating fragmented plots, installing drainage ditches, wells, irrigation pipes, access roads, and electric lines to make fields more productive, resistant to droughts and flooding, and accessible for farm machinery. The goal of the initiative is to raise the land's production capacity as a national food security measure. 

"Permanent basic farmland" is a zoning scheme that designates cropland in certain areas that must be used to produce grain or other important agricultural products and cannot be diverted to other uses. China's 2019 land survey found 1.546 billion mu (103 million hectares) was classified as permanent basic farmland.

China's high-standard field initiative is not new. It began with a pilot program about 15 years ago that built on the "comprehensive agricultural development" program begun in the 1990s. The initiative has gained prominence as Xi Jinping prioritized national food security.

In 2019 China's State Council set a target of creating 800 million mu of high standard farmland by 2022. Officials claimed they had met this target by 2020, with land productivity improvements of 10%-20% attributed to the program.

A plan for 2021-2030 targeted 1.075 billion mu by 2025 and 1.2 billion mu for 2030, with unspecified further increases in high standard fields by 2035. That plan claimed that it would raise China's grain production capacity to 600 million metric tons annually and raise grain self-sufficiency to 90 percent. 

China's farmland is on a kind of treadmill as previously upgraded farmland has to go through new upgrades to address degraded quality or poor construction of earlier upgrades. Worsening problems are reflected by directives in the "Document No. 1" in the last two years to utilize salinized or alkali farmland and to manage erosion gullies in black soil of the northeast and acidified land in southern regions.

A 2023 article from China's Land Science and Technology Institute sounded an alarm about "hidden risks" for China's farmland quality. Concerns were based mostly on findings from China's 2019 national land survey: 

• Farmland in northern regions had expanded by 101 million mu (6.73 million hectares) in 3 years, mainly by converting grassland, wetlands and other environmentally fragile land to agriculture. 
• 63 million mu (4.2 million hectares) of farmland--mainly in the mountainous southwest and loess plateau of the northwest--was on steep slopes of 25 degrees or more. Much of this land was at risk of being abandoned due to remote locations and poor infrastructure. 
• Large swathes of permanent basic farmland were planted in fruit trees or used for nonfarm purposes. 
• The survey highlighted a trend of shifting land from rice paddies to crops that don't need irrigation.
• Multiple cropping (2 or more crops per year grown on the land) is in decline. The proportion of land used for only one crop grew from 40.37 percent to 47.9 percent during 2009-2019. 
• Soil depth was shrinking. The soil depth was generally 12-15 cm, and 71.24 percent of soil was less than 20 cm deep.
• Surface water pollution worsened--more than 40 percent of water quality monitoring points in the Hai and Liao rivers of northern China had water quality of grade 4, 5 or worse.
• The area suffering from declining groundwater expanded northward from the region of the Huang and Hai Rivers regions to eastern Inner Mongolia and the northeastern region.

Many articles have criticized the high standard farmland initiative. For example, a 2023 post on social media warned that land in many such projects ended up abandoned because local officials just went through the motions when building such projects. Farmers often did not grasp the technology or equipment supplied by the government and follow-up management and monitoring is often lacking after rudimentary projects are built. 

An investigation of one high standard farmland project found many irrigation pumps were
solid concrete blocks with a pipe attached. Source: The Paper.

A May 2024 article in a periodical on "Approaches to high standard farmland construction in the new era and persisting problems" by Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs analysts praised the "remarkable results" of the State Council's 2019 billion-mu high standard farmland target, but it focused on problems that make China's farmland an "unstable foundation for national food security": 

• In 2022 the central government budgeted 100 billion yuan for aid, equal to 1000-to-1150 yuan per mu (about $2,140 to $2465 per hectare) for high standard field projects. The authors worried that low funding led to poor quality construction.
• Local officials had chosen sites where construction was easy in order to fulfill their high standard farmland quotas, while hilly areas and those lacking access to irrigation were often neglected because construction was more difficult and costly.
• Maintenance of high standard farmland projects was neglected, so ditches were clogged, pipes broke, and roads cracked.

An October 2024 article in Chinese news outlet Yicai reported that Chinese Government auditors found numerous problems with high standard farmland projects in a dozen provinces: 

• Non-grain crops were planted on some high standard farmland, 
• Some high standard fields were built on land not classified as farmland or on land that doesn't exist
• Facilities were never completed in some projects, and work progress was falsified in some instances. Some projects classified as complete were not in operation.
• Roads were cracked and irrigation equipment was missing, and equipment was not operational in others
• No hydrological survey was done before drilling wells
• In some counties high standard farmland was idle, had garbage dumped on it, or was covered in fish ponds.
• Funds were never paid for some projects while in others the companies were overpaid 
• bidding procedures were suspect in some projects

The latest plan includes many specific provisions that appear to be meant to address many of these problems. It includes suggestions to bulldoze land to flatten it, deepen the soil layer by trucking in soil from elsewhere, engineering banks, reducing slopes, planting trees to prevent wind erosion and intrusion of sand, and adopting improved conservation measures. The plan warns against building farmland on ecologically fragile areas such as tidal flats, steeply sloped land, and land that has been returned to grassland, forest, lakes and pastures. 

The new plan offers different strategies for 7 regions of the country. For example, the northeastern region will focus on improving irrigation and drainage and black soil protection; the lower Yangtze River region will manage drought while also preventing waterlogging; southern coastal provinces will address fragmentation of plots and protecting land from heavy rains in an area regularly hit by typhoons; terraced fields, roads and water delivery facilities will be the focus in southwestern provinces; and in the northwest vulnerability to drought will be a focus.

The new plan implies that the high standard land may be diverted from peasant farmers to scaled-up operations run by companies or farmers with more expertise when it recommends use of information technology to integrate water and fertilizer application, intelligent irrigation, automatic monitoring of soil moisture and insect populations, and use of "smart" meteorological services. 

The new plan calls for improvements in efficiency in a program that involves 5 ministries and 4 levels of government and multiple approvals. Authorities will strengthen supervision, correct delays in funding, stop embezzlement, and investigate and punish those responsible for cutting corners, engineering fraud, and illegal bidding behavior. Companies and individuals will be excluded from the projects if they have a record of legal violations or lack qualifications. 

In Suining, Sichuan Province farmers said canals broke, farmers could not climb onto the ridges, and equipment could not reach fields. An agricultural bureau official was accused of taking 4 million yuan in bribes. Source: Global Times.

The plan says it is strictly forbidden to discharge, dump or store sewage, garbage or industrial waste on farmland. 

The plan says local governments have the main responsibility to finance high standard land projects. The plan gives them permission to raise funds through issuing bonds to supplement central government funds and company investments, and it encourages banks to make loans for the projects. However, many local governments probably lack the finances. The plan includes a proviso that funding for high standard farmland must not increase the "hidden debts of local governments."