China’s Grain for Green Program: A Review of the Largest Ecological Restoration and Rural Development Program in the World
By Claudio O. Delang and Zhen Yuan Springer, 2015 Chapter 2
This chapter describes the six largest programs introduced during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Together, these six Key Forestry Programs (KFPs) cover 97 % of China’s counties and target over 100 million ha of land for forestation. The Grain for Green is the largest of these programs, in terms of area covered, people affected, and money invested. This book only reviews the Grain for Green, but in many villages more than one program was introduced concurrently. In this chapter, we argue that the government introduced the KFPs not only because environmental deterioration had reached a critical point, but also because China was producing a surplus of grain, which lowered farmers’ incomes, and because inequality between the eastern and western provinces was reaching a critical point. The Grain for Green in particular addressed all these problems concurrently, through direct payments to poor farmers willing to set aside marginal land. Partly for this reason, the Grain for Green is considered by many as the best reforestation and rural development program ever undertaken in China.
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