A side effect of the fast pace of industrialization and urbanization was turning a number of grain farmland areas into manufacturing facilities and residential housing.
The Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences estimates that the country has lost about 6 million hectares of farmland in the past decade and suggests that the government develop farmland in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, the Ningxia Hui autonomous region and Heilongjiang province.
Li Guoxiang, deputy director of the rural development institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said it is too early to transfer unused land into reserve farmland.