Cultivated Land Loss Arising from Rapid Urbanization in China (1996-2005)
China is a country with huge population and vast land area, but when we consider how to feed more than 1.3 billion Chinese, or about one fifth of the world total population,the cultivated land resource is significantly important and insufficient. Current statistics show that the cultivated land area per capita in China is only about 40％ of the world average. Since the reform in late 1970s, China has been experiencing a rapid nationwide urbanization. A large amount of cultivated land has been lost in this social and economic transition in the past decades. Utilizing the first national land use and land resource survey results in 1996, official land use investigation data (1996-2005), official statistics on agriculture and socio-economic development at the national and provincial levels (1978-2005), the study analyzed the process of cultivated land loss arising from the rapid urbanization in China since mid-1990s. The research reveals that non-agricultural construction, the readjustment of land use structure within the agricultural sector and the ecological land use conversion are the main causes of arable land loss;Urbanization is one of the most important driving forces for the farmland loss which stimulates the non-agricultural construction and the readjustment of the agricultural structure. As Chinas urbanization has developed to an accelerating phase, it is certain that much more arable land will change to other uses in the following few decades according to the current land use changing trend. Much stricter arable land protection regulations and rational land use countermeasures should be introduced to slow the arable land loss to guarantee food security.
Cultivated Land Urbanization Non-agricultural construction area Agricultural land use structure Urban Population expansion China
Wu Peilin Tan Minghong
Regional Development Research Center, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo 255049, China Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beij
国际会议
北京
英文
362-371
2006-10-14（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）