Yang Zhigang, 48, is worrying about the prospect of a policy which benefited him heavily over the past five years.

"After the government reforested formerly cultivated land, we received compensation and no longer needed to dig our food from the land all day long," said Yang, a peasant farmer from Liugou Village of Guyuan City, located in south Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, which has eight extremely poor counties and cities of the country.

Zhang Haisheng, deputy director of poverty alleviation office in Guyuan, said the land-to-forests policy, which had been put into practice five years ago, had greatly improved the living standards of local farmers and herdsmen in this area.

According to the official, a total of 190,000 families there got subsidies of 54,540 tons of grain and 200 million yuan (about 24 million US dollars) from the central government as an encouragement for their afforestation of 87,000 hectares.

Statistics showed more than 1.56 million of local people living in 17 counties of Ningxia, with a population of less than 5 million, received 1.645 billion yuan (197 million US dollars) of subsidies during the same period.

In order to improve the deteriorating environment, the Chinese government began to carry out a farmland-to-forests policy in the vast area of western China in 2000. Under the policy, farmers are compensated for giving up their terrace land.

A farmer will get 100 kg of grain annually for giving up each plot of some 0.06 hectares of sloping fields in addition to a certain amount in subsidies for buying seedlings. The subsidy term for commercial afforestation is five years and that for ecological afforestation is eight years.

"Besides the subsidies, we hope we can make more money from afforestation in the future," said Yang.

Several proposals for the improvement of land-to-forest measures, issued last April, made it clear that farmers who retire fragile land on hillsides from farming have the right to run and make profits from afforestation in a 50-year contracted term, during which the forest can be inherited or transferred.

The 49th article of the Regulations on Land-to-Forest, enacted in the same year, stipulated farmers' ownership to the forest.

However, subsidies of grain to the farmers were changed to monetary form since last September as China's grain output had decreased for several years. Considering risks from fluctuations in the price of grain, local farmers like Yang would rather be compensated with grain.

Many locals complain the subsidy term is so short as they can only make profits both from commercial and ecological tree- planting in five or eight years, due to particular climatic and geographic conditions in the west China area.

"Once the subsidies are ended," Yang worried, "hard life will begin as we will be thoroughly unemployed."

A report from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the key to the policy's success is to create sustainable production conditions for the farmers. It attributed difficulties in arranging surplus labor force to the underdeveloped follow-up industries.

Zhou Chuanbin, a professor with prestigious Ningxia University, suggested the government properly extend the term for subsidies, rationally control the scale and pace of the land-to-forests campaign and keep stability and continuity in the unprecedented policy.

He also appealed to consolidate the progress via further improvement of the relevant laws and regulations.

Source: Xinhua