中欧社会论坛 - China Europa ForumSoil management and land policies
Introductory document of the WT54 workshop, China-Europe forum
Authors: Michel MERLET, Joseph COMBY
Date: 11 juillet 2007
Published by Association pour l’Amélioration de la Gouvernance de la Terre, de l’Eau et des Ressources Naturelles
I. Workshop Description
Land is, strictly speaking, the base of any workshop. In spite of modern technical developments, land is still the major condition of any sort of agriculture, thus of any subsistence. It is also the physical platform of every other human activity: dwellings, infrastructures and transportation, economic activity, public equipment, leisure activities. As such, it is the object of manifold competitions, and its assignment (as well as their rules of use) to the different activities and areas of society constitutes the foundation of social cohesion, the object of arbitrations and struggles, an essential sector of public and private law, and a major public policy domain.
Consequently, those policies, in China as well as in Europe, have two dimensions: one of them aims at ensuring soil quality and fertility for tomorrow’s agricultural production, and ways to distribute them to farmers in order to attain social equity, economic efficiency and long-term maintenance of this crucial production factor. As such, throughout history, agrarian policies have always been at the core of the organization of both European and Chinese societies. The second dimension, particularly pertinent to urban land policies and planning, aims at assigning certain economic and social activities to certain areas of land while regulating the conditions of competition between those different uses, and preserving the future.
In Europe, types of property and uses of agricultural land, along with modes of management ofurban land, vary from one country to the next, thus offering a vast palette of different experiences. In China, the law passed at the beginning of the year 2007, by bringing the right to own land privately, represents a new major turn. In addition, the extremely fast economic and urban development of China, beyond comparison with that of the European Union, exacerbates the competition for the use of land and is the source of many social conflicts.
The goal of this workshop is to set European and Chinese experiences against one another, to identify which ones are the most cogent, and to define which partnerships ought to be the most promising in those domains for the upcoming decades.
This document in different languages
- English: doc_264.pdf (520 KiB)
- French: doc_108.pdf (570 KiB)
- Chinese: doc_632.pdf (250 KiB)