Beijing has suspended approvals for new golf courses and started
monitoring existing facilities to cut down on massive losses of
arable land to unauthorized projects.?
Golf courses currently under construction but lacking
authorization will be banned and those already approved officially
will be closely supervised in terms of land occupation, water
consumption and environmental protection.
The city has 19 golf courses, with an additional 10 under
construction, but eight of them do not have government approval.
Statistics show the 29 courses occupy 3,708 hectares of land and
possess 540 holes, 30 times the scale of a standard 18-hole golf
course.
The move is to respond to the State Council's latest decision of
clearing up reckless land snatches in the construction of golf
courses.
The Ministry of Land and Resources released Monday rulings on
five cases of illicit land use. Severe disciplinary penalties were
given to government officials in Qihe County, east China's Shandong
Province, who were charged with illegally approving the
transfer of 186 hectares of farmland to build a golf course and a
villa.
Golf course projects have been listed with road construction,
property development and urbanization programs as major factors
engulfing 230,279 hectares of arable land last year.
The ministry's statistics show that China lost 2.53 million
hectares of arable land in 2003, compared with a 1.69-million-ha
loss the previous year, a loss rate as high as 50 percent.
An earlier report by People's Daily indicated that there
are 176 golf courses in 26 provincial regions, which is suggested
as conservative as the figure does not take into account those
under construction or with plans still under scrutiny of local
governments.
"To my knowledge, only one golf course was ever approved by the
State Council. Our ministry has never received any golf course land
applications," said an official with the Ministry of Land and
Resources, the only state department with the power to allow the
non-agricultural use of a land area over 70 hectares, or 1,000
mu.
Few local governments have followed the application procedure or
the rules. They usually call golf courses "image projects" by
claiming they are necessary for a good investment environment to
attract foreign investors.
But farmers losing land are left with little assistance. In the
autumn of last year, about 4,600 mu, or 306 hectares, of
arable land were requisitioned by force by the Mashan district
government of Jimo City, Shandong Province, which compensated
farmers with a mere 400 yuan (US$48) per mu, far below
market prices.
Economists have proposed the establishment of land
appropriation, control and preservation systems, under which
farmers as land contractors should be entitled part ownership of
the plots they cultivate.
(Xinhua News Agency March 20, 2004)