Satellites Put Small Farms on China's Map

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/technology/satellites-put-small-farms-on-chinas-map.html

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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.

International Land Systems, a company acquired by Thomson Reuters in July 2011, was involved in the initial pilot project in Yangwang, which sought to find the most cost-efficient method for carrying out the mapping.

Chen Xiwen, the Chinese Communist Party’s director of rural policy, estimated that costs could be kept to 8 to 10 renminbi per mu, or a national total of about 18 billion renminbi, or $2.9 billion. Other officials said costs could reach 100 billion renminbi, while the financial magazine Caixin said the effort would cost 150 billion renminbi.

Even the minimum would be too much for budget-strapped rural governments. A pilot plan in Matou Township in Anhui, where flat wheat fields are easy to measure, would have equaled one-sixth of the town’s annual budget.

“Land certification needs to be shouldered by the nation; there is no way local governments could pay for it,” said Wang Hong, an official in Matou Township.

The project carries a hidden price tag for Beijing, which subsidizes grain production, fertilizer use and irrigation at an average rate of 150 renminbi per mu. The subsidies are based on area estimates that date from a time when farmers regularly underreported the size of their plots to avoid grain taxes.

Precise mapping could require China to reassess estimates that it has 1.8 billion mu of farmland, which is roughly the amount that Chinese experts calculate is necessary for food security.

Matou Township alone gained 45 percent more registered area with the more accurate mapping, to the delight of township officials and residents hopeful that greater subsidies would follow.

Some efforts to drive down costs as the project is expanded nationally could in fact prove to be costly. Cheaper satellite positioning systems might be less accurate, and software that fails to integrate future land transfers would make the mapping exercise a waste.

Replacing the lengthy village-to-village explanations for the test program with a state media campaign might be quicker but could alarm villagers who were suspicious after decades of state-backed land grabs.

When Yang Changpei, a villager in Yangwang, first heard about the program, he feared that he would lose his land. Careful explanations eased his worries, although he did not see the point of clearer certificates when villagers all know each other.

But his neighbor, Mr. Jian, was enthusiastic.

The berms that villagers use to identify their plots could disappear when fields are merged, he said, leaving villagers in need of some other way to prove what is theirs.

“If you explain it, people across China would understand how important this is,” he added.