CRNTT:
Hunan is known for its rich agricultural produce. Next, as one of the major grain producing provinces in China, which areas will Hunan focus on in order to fulfill the important task of safeguarding national food security?
Mao Weiming:
I will invite my colleague, Ms. Zhang, to answer this one.
Zhang Yingchun:
Thank you for the question. An old saying goes: "The bumper harvests of Hunan and Hubei provinces ensure enough food for the whole country." Hunan is one of the two provinces that have kept transferring rice to other provincial-level regions without interruption since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), contributing substantially to national food security. In 2023, the grain sowing area in Hunan reached 71.45 million mu (4.76 million hectares), with grain production of 61.3 billion jin (30.65 million tons). And the sowing area and output of rice both ranked first nationwide. Moving forward, we will focus our efforts on increasing grain production through sustainable farmland use and innovative application of agricultural technology, with 10 measures implemented for each of the two approaches, and resolutely shoulder the important responsibility of safeguarding national food security.
On one hand, we will implement 10 measures to increase grain production through sustainable farmland use. We will prioritize the protection, improvement, and utilization of farmland, increasing grain production by developing fertile lands. For example, to increase the area of farmland, we will carry out the water resource allocation project around the Dongting Lake to ensure the reclamation and restoration of 1.6 million mu of high-quality farmlands across the Dongting Lake Plain. We will properly promote the rehabilitation of backup farmlands to address the current farmland deficit of 5.82 million mu. We will implement special rectifications to ensure that land for temporary use is adequately restored and reclaimed for agricultural cultivation annually. This year, for quality improvement, we will renovate 3.16 million mu of high-standard croplands to ensure Hunan's 48 million mu of permanent basic croplands can be transformed into high-standard land. We will continue to comprehensively implement the project of construction, management, and protection of small-scale water conservancy facilities for agricultural use and ensure obstacles are removed to smooth irrigation channels of 7,000 kilometers within the year. We will also return plant stalks to fields and address soil acidification with the aim of elevating cultivated land quality by a grade of 0.4. To improve efficiency, we will ensure the management of idle land through land trusteeship and tending farmlands for others to put such land back to use in a timely manner. For alkaline land, we will either grow tolerant crops in such land or transform such land for specific crops to ensure at least 95% of such land is safe to use. Farmlands on mountains will be gradually relocated to the foot of mountains in separate batches to ensure fruit trees can be planted on mountain slopes in an orderly manner. A province-wide initiative will be carried out continuously to safeguard agriculture production and promote rural revitalization, curbing non-agricultural use and prohibiting non-grain use of farmland.
On the other hand, we are striving to make technological breakthroughs in 10 areas to increase grain production, working to build Hunan into an innovation hub for developing the breeding and agricultural machinery industries. Grain production will be increased by utilizing advanced technologies. In terms of grain seed breeding, we will work on making breakthroughs in low-cadmium rice and saline-alkali-resistant rice breeding technologies, increasing the planting area of low-cadmium rice by one million mu on a yearly basis. We will speed up cultivating ratoon rice as well as rice and rapeseed varieties with short growth cycles, with the aim to increase 500,000 mu of farmland featuring the rotation mode of "ratoon rice-ratoon rice-rapeseed" each year. In terms of promoting high-quality agricultural machinery, we will strive to make breakthroughs in key generic technologies for agricultural equipment, building a hub for producing agricultural machinery suitable for use in hilly terrains. We will actively promote mechanical transplanting and seed throwing, increasing dense planting by 5 percentage points annually. We will move fast to develop and promote loss-reduction devices used for mechanical harvest, lowering grain loss rate by 0.3 percentage point annually on average. For example, in terms of adopting good measures, we will promote centralized seedling breeding for early rice, building related facilities of more than 10 million square meters. We will strengthen the leading role of high-yield farming examples, creating 5,000 pieces of demonstration fields for high-yield, high-efficiency production annually. We will create a number of green production demonstration areas, realizing the full coverage of side-deep fertilization and green methods for pest and disease prevention and control. We will vigorously promote the plan to boost grain production, increasing 100,000 mu of farmland annually under the high-yielding program of "feeding one person with rice yield from around 0.3 mu of field." We will also establish a coordination mechanism for commercial services for agriculture, aiming to improve related services.
That's all from me. Thank you.
