Cultivated Land Protection, Urbanization and Land Utilization Conflicts in China

摘要

Cultivated land protection is an important guarantee for economical and social sustainable development in China with vast population and scarce land per capita. Since 1990’s, cultivated land had been shrinking for being converted to industrial and residential uses for urbanization in China. Of all the new urban land, about 74% was converted from arable land. In urbanization process, land utilization conflicts are inevitable between urban land expansion and cultivated land protection. Based on theory of synergetics, this paper constructs the model of land utilization conflicts to calculate the index of land utilization conflicts by 31 provinces in China. The index is decided by urban land potential and cultivated land capacity. The provinces with greater degree of urban land potential will accommodate with more new people and encroach upon less cultivated land in urbanization process. The provinces with larger capacity of cultivated land will have larger recuperability to external impacts and more land supply to urban expansion. The provinces whose index of land utilization conflicts less than 1.0 are Heilongjiang, Xinjiang, Xizang and Neimenggu. They can cope with unfavorable influence by urbanization by themselves. Furthermore, they can supply surplus grain for other provinces. The provinces whose index of land utilization conflicts more than 1.7 are Guangdong, Guizhou, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Fujian. The province with maximum of index is Cuangdong (the index more than 1.86). The reasons for sharpest conflicts between urban land use and cultivated land are huge pressure of economical development, high population density and extremely scarce land resource. It is impossible that resolve the conflicts by themselves. In national perspective, the regional coordination of resources is critical measure to solve this problem in the provinces which have sharpest conflicts.