According to new land use regulations, authorities have to consent to requests for hearing from affected farmers.

"Generally speaking, compensations for farmers who have lost their land use rights, is much lower than the actual values," said Pan Mingcai, director of the Department of Arable Land Protection under the Ministry of Land and Resources.

"The central government plans to increase the compensation standards by two to three times in the next a few years."

Wang Shouzhi, director of the ministry's Policy and Regulation Department announced the country's first regulation on hearings for land and resource management during a news conference Tuesday.

"Any land official daring to turn down the requirement will be subject to administrative punishments," Wang said.

The new regulation will become effective on May 1.

Wang said the new regulation will help safeguard the interests of farmers as the country's process of urbanization speeds up.

As more and more farmland is used for construction purposes the number of appeals is surging and more farmers are seeking more "reasonable" compensation.

Many farmers have seen their plots of land reduced to nothing as buildings go up.

Fu Xiurong, a 56-year-old woman in the Nanyu Village of Yanshan County, North China's Hebei Province, hopes the new regulation will lead to better compensation for farmers who lose their land-use rights.

"Without the land, we have no way to make a living," she said.

Fu used to have 0.53 hectares of arable land, on which she planted wheat and corns. But in the past a few years, she has lost 0.47 hectares to various requisitions. She now sees roads, a vegetable market and residential buildings where the wheat and corns used to prosper.

Fu got 4,000-odd yuan (US$483.1) in compensation for every 0.07 hectare. Not much, but good in comparison with many other farmers in the area, whose received less than 1,000 yuan (US$120.8).

Some believe more equitable compensation can help both the farmers and the economy.

"If handled well, such transfers will help the country in its urbanization efforts and address the troublesome problem of redundant rural laborers. However, if not properly dealt with, they may jeopardize the interests the farmers," said Wang Xiaoying, a researcher with the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

According to a ministry announcement last November, no requisition of rural land will be approved without the endorsement of affected farmers.

In effect, the regulation abolishes a decades-old practice of only publishing plans after they have been approved by the central government.

The new regulation, said Wang, moves one step further to protect farmers' interests from unfair governmental requisitions and all kinds of projects which change the original agricultural use of the land.

In addition to public hearings, the regulation stipulates land officials have to organize public hearings on land use projects, which will have a major impact on parties involved, before applying for central governmental endorsement.

These hearings have to include, for example, basic land prices and reviews of governmental utilization programs of land and mineral resources.

Statistics from the ministry indicate only a portion of the compensation intended for farmers has ended up in their hands.

Up to 60 to 70 percent has gone to local governments, 25 to 30 percent to village collective units and less than 10 percent to affected farmers themselves.

Although the State and collective units own all of the country's land, farmers are the ones who have their livelihood directly connected with the output of the land, Pan said. "The number of these farmers has been decreasing along with the process of urbanization, but the fate of the rest cannot be ignored. The government has a responsibility to take care of them."

(China Daily February 10, 2004)