Abstract
China has implemented a "land contract responsibility system" since the 1980s, and this system has triggered a variety of problems. In particular, "land increase without income increase" in agriculture and unwillingness to take up farming have become the principal problems in rural areas of inland China under the conditions of agricultural production boundaries. As an essential problem involving in China's agriculture, it presents an urgent agenda issue of Chinese agricultural policy. The research traces the root causes of land problems being interwoven with China's agricultural management by making a case study on "land increase without income increase" of rural households in inland China areas such as Inner Mongolia. "Land increase without income increase" describes the case in which farmland area increases, but income fails to increase, leading to another phrase: "the more land, the poorer". Field studies have been made on Hangjinqi area in Inner Mongolia since July 2007. On the basis of these, the following issues are analyzed: (1) the characteristics of agriculture in the land of arable boundaries (natural location); (2) the deterioration of arable land (soil) due to over-fertilization; and (3) the boundaries of small and decentralized farming of contract land.
