Recently, Tangshan Fengrun District, on the grounds of air pollution control, forced farmers to sign a contract to agree to plant trees on their arable land, and despite the farmers’ opposition, they brazenly destroyed seedlings and dug pits on their arable land, triggering local public discontent. After the farmers complained to the media, the incident aroused widespread concern. Under the pressure of public opinion, Tangshan City officials said they would carry out rectification.
The government of Tangshan’s Fengrun District recently forced farmers from several villages to sign a contract to lease their arable land to a company that will plant trees on the land, according to a report by CCTV. The local claim is that the move is for air pollution prevention and control, greening and planting trees in the northern part of the city.
According to the report, Fengrun District intends to lease an area of 1,551.27 mu of land to a company for 10 years at a price of 1,200 RMB per mu per year to plant flowers, trees, etc. The company has now paid 1 year’s rent.
Many villagers disagreed with the local government’s decision, but the government simply did not adopt the villagers’ opinions.
According to the farmers, they heard the village radio notice on March 13, and started to ask people to go to the village committee to sign on March 15, and on March 30, they found that their own arable land had been destroyed by seedlings and dug pits.
Government action triggered strong dissatisfaction of local villagers, some local villagers had a physical conflict with the relevant personnel, but also reported to the police. A villager said that it is difficult to convince the public of the coercive behavior of the relevant departments. He said, “Do not sign the contract, but also all forced to plant trees for you, mainly all here, the people are not convinced, is so caused by the dispute.”
A farmer who did not sign the lease said: “It is not a matter of less or less, because our people are sixty or seventy years old, no one wants to work. If we hit this acre of grain, we can eat for a year. We all have this idea. Now there is also a comparison, before there is given a year, the next year does not give, we people have no place to go.”
The report said that on April 11 in the Fengrun District, Fengrun Town, West Mazhuang Village also saw rows of good growth of wheat seedlings have been destroyed, replaced by saplings just planted on a short time.
According to agricultural experts, the practice in Fengrun District has been banned by the Chinese Communist Party authorities since 2020.
In September 2020, the General Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) issued a circular to stop the “non-agriculturalization” of arable land; among other things, the “illegal occupation of permanent basic farmland for reforestation” was explicitly banned.
A researcher from the Academy of Social Sciences said that the local government’s planting of a few trees has nothing to do with environmental improvement, but is instead a calculation of interests.
The Tangshan city government ignored public opinion, brutal one-size-fits-all destruction of seedlings and digging pits practice caused a furor. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to the public. The government is still a civil servant, a parent official?”
Under the pressure of public opinion, Tangshan authorities issued a notice that the policy grasp of the Fengrun District deviations, functional departments do not supervise the cloud, should be rectified and investigated by the discipline inspection department, but there has not yet been the following.
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