On Farmland Protection

Arable land, which is the food production base of humanbeings and the most basic material foundation that the farmers depend upon for survival, matters a nation's food security and social stability, and plays an irreplaceable role. However, with the development of our reform and openning, with the fast growth of social economy, the construct inevitably have occupied,and will occupy lots of alable land, especially high-quality land. In result, large number of high-quality land have been lost, the quality of land has kept on decreasing, and the problems between people and land have been more and more outstanding. All of these call for us to make further research on farmland protection system.The article is based on the theories and methods of neo-institutional economics, land economics and other related subjects, using the combination methods of micro-analysis and macro-analysis, qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, history analysis and logical analysis, normative analysis and positive analysis, makes a in-depth study on farmland protection in our country under the latest background. Our nation pay a great attenton on arable land problems. By revised edition of Land Administration Law, they raised a strategic target to realize dynamic balance of total cultivated land in China, and drew up mesures to protect arable land, such as basic farmland protection areas ,land use control, compensation on occupied land.With a new cycle of economic increasing resulting from China's entry into WTO, the work of protecting land is facing more pressure. During the implementing of land protection measures, its performance in fact was not very good, and both the amount and the quality of land are continually decreasing. This mainly because the balance of quantity is always one-sided highlighted, land use control system is not comprehensive and its authority is not fully embodied, dynamic monitor to land protection is behind time, and oversight of law enforcement is not effective. The reasons for these problems is the unsound arable land protection legal system, imperfect arable land protection policy, insufficient arable land protection policy implementation and not enough public participation in arable land protection. In previous studies, people tended to attach importance to the first three factors. However, by analysis, this paper found that because of the constraints of traditional political culture, lack of institutionalization, immature development of civil society, and lack of mutual trust between citizens and government, public participation in land protection is not enough, which is the main reason for the poor performance of land protection policy.In China, the implementation of state-owned land policy makes the protection mainly depend on government. However,the government's strength is limited, so that it requires public participation in the protection of cultivated land. Followed at the principles of fairness, inform, efficiency and sustainability, public participation in the farmland protection requires to set up a operation mechanism of public participation at both levels including system and technique. During operations, the process of public participation in the protection of arable land can be divided into three stages: public education, public awareness and public participation, in accordance with the different stages in public participation process. Among them, the participatory protection is a new method for government to solve the protection problems, and is a transformation of "command - control" policy, in which government is the center. Government authorized to the public and other stakeholders, who are made to play an important role on the policy planning and decision-making process.The innovation of this article is to put public participation theory into farmland protection. This paper discusses the loss of benefits on land protection resulting from lack of public participation at the course of the arable land protection. Based on the four principles of public participation in protection of cultivated land, we propose the operation mechanism and process of public participation in farmland protection, in purpose of enhancing China's cultivated land protection to ensure the safety of our country's arable land and food security.