Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
1,360,000 ha. There are around 67 Mha of
dry farmland in China suitable for using
ConsT technology. The ConsT-covered
area, however, is only about 1.36 Mha, ac-
counting for only 2% of ConsT-suitable
area. In April 2007, the MOA delivered an
official report to promote the extension of
ConsT technology. This plan will cover
4  Mha of farmland for ConsT by the end of
the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (MOA, 2007).
Up to the end of 2008, China had set up
226 national demonstration counties and
365 provincial demonstration counties for
ConsT. The implemented area of ConsT is
3.33 Mha. ConsT technology was pushed
further forward in 2012, when the central
government spent 30 million Yuan to sup-
port the extension of ConsT in 204 coun-
ties of China and 300 million Yuan to
support the establishment of the ConsT
demonstration base in 80 additional coun-
ties (Department of Agricultural Mechan-
ization Management, MOA, 2012).
The implementation of CR in China
was mainly started in the 1980s, and the
CR-covered area was about 3.5 Mha by the
end of 1999, with levels of CR in the field
at around 3.5 t ha - 1 (Huang et al ., 2010).
The implementation of CR through agricul-
tural machinery for primary crops such as
wheat, maize and paddy rice is currently
about 23.8 Mha, and this accounts for
about 15% of the crop-sown area in China
(Department of Science and Education,
MOA, 2010).
'Grain for Green' Project (GGP, e.g. returning
farmland to forest/pasture) and fenced-in
grazing were also proposed and imple-
mented in China. After the 6- year effort
from 1999 to 2004, a total of 16.71 Mha of
grain-planted area was returned successfully
to forest/grassland, including 7.00  Mha of
forest returned from cropland and 9.71 Mha
of barren mountains used for grass growing
(Wang and Chen, 2006). The desertification
area decreased by 6416 km 2 , with an aver-
age decrease rate of 1283 km 2 year - 1 (Shen,
2007), and approximately 18% of the soil
erosion area was also controlled (Lin et al .,
2005). Moreover, the policy to restrict and
ban biomass cutting, and the six forestation
projects (State Forestry Administration of
China, 2005), also benefited the accumula-
tion of carbon in the vegetation and soils of
China. The six forestation projects are: the
NFP; the GGP; the Shelterbelts Project in
northern, north-eastern and north-western
China and in the Yangtze River basin; the
desertification prevention and control
around Beijing project; the national wild-
life conservation and nature reserve con-
struction project; and the fast-growing and
high-yielding timber base construction pro-
gramme (State Forestry Administration of
China, 2005).
The Difficulty and Challenge
of Soil Carbon Sequestration
in China
The carbon sequestration potential in the
soils of China is large and promising, which
may offset the emission of greenhouse gases
to a certain extent, but China still has to face
many difficulties and challenges in the gov-
ernance of soil carbon.
Ecological construction (EC) project
The EC project of China officially origin-
ated from the 'National Ecological Environ-
ment Construction Plan' issued by the
former State Planning Committee of China
at the end of 1998 (Shen, 2007). A total of
six subplans were included in the plan,
which were nature conservation (ecosystem,
wildlife and natural landscape), afforestation,
soil and water conservation, desertification
control, grassland protection and ecological
agriculture development. Subsequently,
several EC projects, such as the Natural
Forest Protection Programme (NFP), the
Funding and technology limitation
China, as a developing country, is still
under conditions of traditional agricultural
production. Although the extension and
demonstration of the STFR, FS, ConsT, CR
and EC projects have been implemented in
 
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