Cultivated land protection and rational use in China

Cultivated land protection is an important way to ensure food security, social stability and sustainable development. As one of the main causes of cultivated land loss, the spatio-temporal pattern of illegal cultivated land use and driving forces have not been systematically investigated. This study first reviewed the evolution of China’s cultivated land protection policy in the past four decades, then used spatial analysis technology to explore the spatio-temporal patterns of China’s illegal cultivated land use, and finally applied an econometric model to assess the impact of population growth, economic development and rising housing prices on illegal cultivated land use at the national and regional levels based on the balanced provincial panel data from 1999 to 2017. The results show that in the past 40 years, China has attached great importance to the protection of cultivated land, and established a relatively perfect cultivated land protection system. The quantity of cultivated land in China kept a dynamic balance on the whole, but the quality of cultivated land has dropped sharply, and regional human-land conflicts has become prominent. The driving forces of cultivated land loss in China varied across regions. Illegal use of cultivated land was also one of the important driving forces of cultivated land reduction in China. The number of illegal land use cases and the area appropriated have experienced a process of first increase and then decrease over the past two decades. The accumulated cases and area of illegal farmland use in the eastern region were larger than that in the central and western regions, but both showed a rapid downward trend over the past two decades, demonstrating that the illegal use of cultivated land in eastern China has been controlled to a certain extent. Population growth and land urbanization have a significant positive impact on illegal cultivated land use area in China and its three regions, while economic development has not driven but curbed illegal land use. The rise of commercial housing prices has no significant impact on illegal farmland use in rural China. We proposed measures to further control the illegal use of cultivated land, and believed that it is necessary and urgent to stop illegal occupation of cultivated land from the source