Land Reform in China

October 12, 2008 Robert

The IHT is carrying news of a new land policy in China. Here is the lead:

Chinese leaders approved on Sunday a policy that will in theory allow peasants to buy and sell their land rights, a move that sets in motion the nation's biggest economic reform in many years, according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency.

The print version I picked up in Hong Kong today is a bit different. It carries this crucial bit of information:

The government's goal is to double the per-capita disposable income of rural residents by 2020 from the 2008 level, according to Xinhua.

It is unclear how much the plan is intended to increase total per capita income in rural areas. I think this is particularly important because it will strongly influence how much almost 800 milllion people (according to the article) have to spend on food. Implementing the land reform plan may put a time scale on the increase in food demand that I speculated about recently in "More on China's Economy, Food Production, and Food Demand".

If the numbers in that post are mostly correct, this would mean that if China is going to stay self-sufficient with respect to food supply needs to increase its domestic production by something like 20% in the next 11 years. They have their work cut out.