A news item, reproduced below, from a recent edition of The Hindu puts the focus on land conservation. With so much of our forest and agricultural lands being gobbled up for the so called 'developmental acitivities', and new policies like SEZs (which are expected to take about 75,000 hectare of similar land in next few years), continuing unabated where are we heading? An estimation also indicates that about 50% our cultivable land has been lost since independence.
Shall we continue in this path of large scale industrialisation without having due consideration towards the agriculture, environment, project affected people and other social issues? Do we have to blindly follow the path of some of the more affluent countries, which are adopting a policy of more of urban population than the rural population? While such a policy may be tolerable in case of large size countries like Canada and Australia, will it it not be a doom for our huge population? How are we going to ensure food security for a population, which is expected to touch 1.5 billon by 2040? Shall we not take a pause from the frenetic industrialisation, and review where we are heading?
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China to conserve land : 18.10.2006
CHINA'S MINISTRY of Land and Resources will urge provincial governments across the country to conserve a total of 120 million hectares of arable land till 2020, because farmland shrinkage is threatening the country's grain production.
The decision was made after the State Council, or China's cabinet, rejected the Ministry's previous plan for land use last September. The first plan proposed to guarantee the acreage until only 2010, according to Ministry sources.
The Ministry has started working on a revised plan, which analysts believe will require local governments at all levels to make greater efforts to protect arable land and impose stricter controls on the use of farmland for construction.
From 1996 to 2004, China's arable land shrank from 130 million to 122 million hectares, with an annual average decrease of 950,000 hectares.
Meanwhile, China's population has been growing by 10 million each year, leading to concerns about food security in the country — where 22 per cent of the world's population lives on only 7 per cent of the world's arable land.
