World Food Policy WFP Volume 4, No. 2, Spring 2018 | Page 48

World Food Policy
China’s second land reform
was initiated through the household
responsibility system (HRS) in 1978.
The HRS reform dismantled the col-
lective production, and distributed
the collectively owned land to all vil-
lage households based on number of
people and labor in the household
with the first contracted period of 15
years and then renewed for the other
30 years after the late 1990s (Lin, 1992;
Brandt et al., 2002). The effects of HRS
on the equitable distribution of land to
farmers and ultimately on agricultur-
al productivity, agricultural structural
change and poverty alleviation have
been obvious and well documented
(Lin, 1992; Huang and Rozelle, 1996;
McMillan et al., 1989; Jin et al., 2002).
Moreover, the increase in agricultural
productivity and food production re-
sulted from HRS triggered a number
of subsequent economic growth dy-
namics, such as providing agricultural
surplus labor for labor-intensive rural
township and village enterprise (TVE)
development in the mid-1980s (McK-
innon, 1993), facilitating China’s over-
all industrialization and ST since the
early 1990s, and generating demand
for the intermediate products of man-
ufactures in the rest of economy (Qian
and Xu, 1998).
can be transferred from among farm-
ers through land rental market, and
emphasizing the further long run con-
tract rights (or permanent) after end-
ing the current 30 years contract in the
late 2020s. With rising opportunities
in off-farm employment and emerg-
ing rural-urban migration, assisting
smallholders to either move up or move
out farming is critical. As the results
of these institutional innovation, there
has been a rapid emergence of middle
and large farms in China (Huang and
Ding, 2016). As rural households (or
land contracted households) can decide
whether to be “landlords” by renting
out their land or expand their farm size,
such achieving equity of land owner-
ship distribution, increasing efficiency
of land use, and facilitating rural trans-
formation through either specializing
in agricultural production or moving to
off-farm employment.
In the past six to seven decades,
many developing countries in Asia have
also pursued land reform but the re-
sults are mixture. Land reform in Viet-
nam reemphasized the essential of land
reform in facilitating inclusive rural
transformation. Vietnam followed suit
with the land reform similar to that of
China but even go beyond China by
allowing farmers to buy, sell, and be-
Recent land reforms have empha- queath land and to use land as collateral
sized on securing land property rights with financial institutions for mortgag-
and facilitating land use rights transfer. es. 6 The reforms have resulted in the
These include ensuring the contracted significant rise in agricultural produc-
rights for the original contracted house- tivity, farmer’s income and rural pover-
holds, creating operation rights that ty reduction (Nguyen and Goletti, 2001;
6
In China, the right to buy and sell as well as use land as collateral with financial institutions for
mortgages has not been implemented.
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