Han Jun:
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Since the 18th CPC National Congress, under the strong leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, we have followed a new development philosophy, taking agriculture, rural areas, and farmers as the top priority of CPC's work and promoted innovation in the practice, theories and institutions of work in this regard. We have held an annual Central Rural Work Conference for five consecutive years; issued the annual No.1 Central Document focusing on agriculture, rural areas, and farmers; formulated policies to comprehensively deepen rural reform, accelerate agricultural modernization, build a new socialist countryside, advance supply-side structural reform in agriculture, foster new growth engines to power agricultural and rural development; underscored the importance of agriculture and boosted its development. Thanks to the concerted efforts of the CPC and the entire country, difficulties and challenges in the development of agriculture and rural areas have been overcome and historic achievements made.
Just now, Mr. Han Changfu described the progress on agriculture and rural area development from six perspectives. The achievements should be attributed to the Party's leadership. Preliminary statistics show that, after the 18th CPC National Congress, General Secretary Xi Jinping took 23 inspection tours to rural area across the nation to gauge public opinion and seek solutions that would promote further rural development. In a series of instructions and speeches, he proposed new ideas and strategies for the work related to agriculture and the rural areas.
After the 18th CPC National Congress, we have accumulated important experiences in three specific aspects.
Han Jun:
Firstly, we continue to adhere to overall planning and top-level design in rural reform. Focusing on properly handling the relationship between farmers and the land, we have implemented measures for separating land ownership rights, contract rights and management rights for rural land. We have also made overall arrangements to carry out trial reforms with regard to rural land requisition, the marketization of rural collective land designated for commercial construction and the system covering rural residential land.
Focusing on properly handling the relationship between government and market, we have been constantly deepening reforms of the purchase and storage systems, as well as the pricing mechanism for grain and other important agricultural products. We have gained notable progress through pilot reform programs for ensuring guaranteed base prices for cotton from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and soybeans from northeast China.
In addition, we have also improved the agricultural subsidy system, promoted the integration of agriculture-related funds, innovated the rural credit and insurance mechanism, deepened comprehensive reform of the rural supply and marketing cooperatives and promoted reforms in the handling of reclaimed land.
We have ensured an orderly, stable and rapid reform mode. The implementation of a series of rural reform measures has injected powerful endogenous impetus to agriculture and rural development.
Han Jun:
Secondly, we have been working on a balanced and coordinated development between urban and rural areas. Despite the tightening financial revenue and expenditure, we continue to give priority to agriculture, rural areas and farmers in our public expenditures, which ensured the stable growth of the investment in these three areas.
From 2013 to 2017, China's national general public budget expenditures for agriculture, forestry and water are expected to reach 8.28 trillion yuan. More newly-added budget expenditures for education, culture, health care and other social undertakings were allocated to rural areas. As such, the basic standards and level of rural public services have been improved. We promoted new socialist countryside construction and carried out projects to improve the water supply, roads, power grids and internet connectivity in the countryside. We have also reinforced the dangerous buildings in rural areas.
We worked to improve living conditions in rural areas, with waste and sewage treatment as the focus. Rural production and living conditions have undergone significant changes. With increased support to rural compulsory education, the conditions for schools have been further improved. New systems for rural cooperative medical care and assistance for treating major and serious diseases were put in place. We increased subsistence allowances, benefits and basic pension benefits for entitled groups. The culture and sports industries have become more prosperous. Take the new rural cooperative medical care system as an example: financial subsidies at all levels reached 450 yuan this year, a twofold increase since 2012.
By the end of this August, over 500 million urban and rural residents have been covered by endowment insurance, among which 488 million were rural residents; over 150 million people reaching the age of 60 have been able to draw a pension. The income of farmers has been growing faster than urban residents for five consecutive years. The income gap between urban and rural residents fell from 2.88:1 in 2012 to 2.72:1 last year.
We have also carried out targeted poverty alleviation. By the end of last year, 55.64 million poor people in rural areas had been enabled to shake off poverty steadily, and the incidence of poverty in the country dropped from 10.2 to 4.5 percent. In the process of promoting new type urbanization, we have promoted basic public services in urban areas to cover all permanent residents. From 2012 to 2016, 60 million people originally with a rural household registration were able to transfer to urban household registration.
We have been making full use of the unique advantages of the countryside to foster new industries like rural e-commerce, leisure agriculture and rural tourism, and promote integrated development of the primary, secondary and tertiary industries in rural areas. With coordinated planning of urban and rural areas, the agriculture sector and rural areas have demonstrated new appeal. More people are moving or returning to the countryside to start their own businesses.
Third, sticking to green, sustainable development, with the firm belief that green can turn to gold too, we have put greater emphasis on ecological progress and promoted clean production methods in rural areas.
We ensured that China's farmland remains at or above the red line. Presently, the area of land recognized as permanent basic cropland totals 1.55 billion mu (1 mu=0.067 hectare).
We protected the community of life, which consists of mountains, water, forests and farmland ecosystems. Pilot programs were launched to reform crop rotation and fallow land systems. More marginal farmland was turned into forests or grasslands, with 30.10 million mu of marginal farmland transformed from 2014 to 2016, and 12.30 million mu of farmland to be transformed this year.
We also protected natural forests in an all-round way, and tackled agricultural pollution from non-point sources and other prominent problems in the ecological field.
We have entered a new phase of reform on agriculture and the rural area. The future will be even brighter.
That's all I want to share with you. Thank you.
Hu Kaihong:
Thank you, Mr. Han. Now let's move to the question session. Please identify your media outlet before stating your question.