Plant plan progresses
( 2003-07-28 09:14) (China Daily)
More than 4.57 million hectares of farmland has been converted back into
forest across China in the first half of this year, the State Forestry
Administration announced yesterday in Beijing.
The amount accounts for 70.7 per cent of the 6.47 million hectares of
cultivated land that is planned to be converted this year.
In a bid to rebuild a sound environment, the programme "Converting cultivated
land into forests" was carried out in Northwest China's Shaanxi and Gansu
provinces and in Southwest China's Sichuan Province in 1999.
It started to be implemented all over the country at the beginning of last
year. The project offers annual subsidies of between 100 and 150 kilograms of
food for each mu (0.067 hectares) of cultivated land the farmers have converted
to forest. In addition, the farmers are paid 20 yuan (US$2.40) each year for
each mu of converted land.
Between 1999 and 2002, the government invested more than 23.5 billion yuan
(US$2.8 billion) in converting nearly 8 million hectares of cultivated land back
to forests.
|
