Page:2017 Report on the Work of the Government.pdf/30

 We will push forward with structural adjustment in agriculture.

We will guide farmers in responding to market demand, increasing the supply of quality green agricultural products and the production of quality rice and wheat, and making appropriate reductions to the amount of land devoted to growing corn. We will expand trials to replace grain crop with feed crop cultivation to cover over 667,000 hectares. We will encourage the use of multiple channels to reduce excess stockpiles of corn. We will support major agricultural production areas in developing intensive processing of agricultural products, extend industry chains and value chains, and step up the integrated development of primary, secondary, and tertiary industries in rural areas.

We will boost the development of modern agriculture.

We will work faster to see due standards are followed in agricultural production, and promote the development of brand name agricultural products. We will create functional zones for grain production, major agricultural product protection areas, areas for growing quality and distinctively local agricultural products, and modern agriculture industrial parks. We will continue to improve rural land and upgrade low- and medium-yield cropland, adding 1.33 million hectares of farmland under highly water-efficient irrigation.

Developing appropriately scaled, diversified farming operations is vital for Chinese-style agricultural modernization, and these operations need to be covered by agricultural insurance. This year, in selected counties and county-level cities in 13 major grain-producing provinces, we will provide catastrophe insurance for farmers engaging in appropriately scaled farming operations. We will channel a portion of budgetary disaster relief funds into this initiative and raise the benefits of the insurance scheme. We will improve the agricultural reinsurance system. We wish to use sustainable and sound agricultural insurance schemes to drive the development of modern agriculture.

We will deepen rural reforms.

We will take steady steps to reform the rural collective property rights system and deepen the pilot reform of the rural land system to see our farmers are granted more property rights.

We will improve pricing mechanisms for grain and other agricultural products as well as the system for their purchase and storage. We will carry out comprehensive reform of the pricing for water used in agriculture. We will deepen reforms related to collective forest tenure, state forestry areas and farms, state-owned farms, and rural supply and marketing cooperatives. We will improve