Rural land engineering and poverty alleviation: Lessons from typical regions in China

Abstract

Poverty is a key issue restricting rural sustainable development; concurrently, regional land degradation impedes agricultural development and rural revitalization. China faces severe land degradation and deepening rural poverty under the context of rapid urbanization. To address these challenges, sustainable land use is an important tool in our society's economic development. Rural engineering, including rural land consolidation, reclamation, restoration, reallocation, improvement, and development, is the most direct and effective way to achieve rural sustainable poverty alleviation. This study clarifies the framework between land engineering and rural poverty alleviation, and introduces land engineering technologies, newly created land utilization practices, and the contributions to poverty alleviation in representative degraded land regions. Land engineering can increase land quantity, improve land quality, enhance land ecological function, and promote man-land system coupling. Further, it can erase rural poverty by increasing county revenue and households' income, lead to industrial development, and improve living environment. Specifically, degraded sandy land, gully land, hollowed construction land, and barren hilly land are transformed into productive land by improving the land structure. Innovated land engineering technologies and sustainable land utilization modes can provide the basic theories and reference approaches for rural poverty alleviation. Identifying obstacles to effective land and corresponding engineering practices are crucial to regional land exploitation and development, improving quality of life and alleviating rural poverty.

China’s rural revitalization and development: Theory, technology and management

“…By innovating the modern gully agricultural development pattern based on the production-living-ecology integration, the land consolidation project has introduced forage rape into the agricultural production chain after gully consolidation and promoted the multi-functional agriculture of "planting + breeding + processing + sightseeing". This innovation laid a foundation for realizing the multi-functional gully agriculture pattern from single cropping (corn) into double cropping (corn + rape) (Liu et al, 2019b), and from one industry into three industries in the gully regions of the Loess Plateau, while simultaneously promoting the cooperative and professional construction of agricultural bases Liu and Wang, 2019). (3) Barren hilly land consolidation project: the land consolidation and circulation project in Fuping County of Hebei Province-The development of mountainous areas of Fuping County is mainly based on a requisition-compensation balance.…”

“…Damaged construction land and unused land with a slope of less than 25° is developed into cultivated land which is used for a requisition-compensation balance; furthermore, the surplus index of construction land is transferred within the province. The intra-provincial transfer of the land-use index is a market transaction of the land development right and a transaction between the rural and urban land development rights (Liu and Wang, 2019). This transaction not only promotes the bilateral flow and efficient integration of urban-rural resources while increasing the supply of urban construction land but also effectively increases peasants' income from the assets-oriented conversion of land by promoting the capitalization of land resources (Zhou et al, 2019).…”

Land use transition and rural spatial governance: Mechanism, framework and perspectives

“…The governance of rural physical space can help to exploit the potential of rural space development, improve the level of supporting rural infrastructure, reverse the defilement and degradation trends of rural space, and expand the capacity of rural space utilization (Long, 2014;Liu and Wang, 2019). The focus of rural physical space governance is to solve the practical problem of uncoordinated spatial structure and function of "production-living-ecology" spaces.…”

“…The rural physical space governance should focus on the optimization of the structure and function of the "production-living-ecology" lands, and then promote the efficient operation of the rural physical space through farmland management. Agricultural land can be improved through agricultural land consolidation, land leveling, high-standard farmland construction, water conservancy, transportation, and introduction of land protection measures, which improve the quality, increase the area, and optimize the internal structure of rural production space (Liu and Wang, 2019;Long et al, 2019b).…”

“…Carrying out rural spatial governance provides the means to effectively resolve the structural and functional problems that arise in the process of rural space development and utilization and creates conditions for constructing a rural development pattern with orderly space, clear ownership, and efficient organization. The rational development and utilization of rural space is the material basis for ensuring rural transformation and development (Long, 2014;Long et al, 2019a;Liu and Wang, 2019). The governance of "matter-ownership-organization" of rural space provides support for RTD.…”