Subsidy policies on fallow of cultivated land in selected countries and regions and their enlightenment to China

Abstract: In order to ensure the successful smooth implementation of cultivated land fallow project and long-term preservation of its effectiveness, China has been developing reasonable subsidy policy of cultivated land fallow in recent years. Excessive agricultural intensification and chemical agricultural production has caused a series of problems in China, such as soil productivity deterioration pressure, soil pollution, soil degradation etc.. These problems restrict the farmland sustainable use and agricultural sustainable development. At the same time, the overall supply of China's grain is relatively abundant, and there is a phenomenon of price inversion in the international grain market. Farmland fallow refers to the measures taken by land owners or users to replace crops or not to farm in a certain period for the purpose of improving farming efficiency and promote sustainable use of land. It is important to select some area as a pilot area in China, and implement cultivated land fallow project, because this not only can maintain the sustainable development, the restoration of soil fertility, and improve the quality of cultivated land, but also can balance the grain supply and demand contradiction to ensure food security and stable income of farmers. In this article, we selected the United States, Japan, the European Union, China Taiwan and other countries and regions as the study areas. It is mainly because these areas have many years of experience in fallow practice, and have developed the policy of subsidy to the farmers. The agricultural development in the United States and the European Union have a large scale farm, which is characterized by large scale of operation, high degree of mechanization and professional farmers. But the characteristics of farm in Japan and China are small both in size and economic scale, which is known for low mechanization, high specialization of agricultural management, and scattered farmers. In this paper, we reviewed the literature and used comparative analysis and induction to analyze the practice of fallow subsidy in these countries and regions, then summarized the purpose of the fallow subsidy, the model of implementation, the form of subsidies (the basis of subsidy and the fund of subsidy). In addition, China has practiced a pilot project in fallow of cultivating arable land for one year. During that time, there are a few areas in fallowing, they are mainly in the areas of groundwater funnel, heavy metal pollution, serious ecological degradation, continuous cropping and other ecological environment. Overall, the cultivated land fallow system pilot area has achieved good results, food production capacity has improved, ecological environment has also been improved. However, since the fallow system in China is only in the exploratory stage, the implementation of the fallow subsidy policy may also have many potential problems, including the insufficient motivation of compensation subject, the lack of flexibility in the subsidy standard, the single source of subsidy funds and the weakness of subsidy systems. Finally, in view of these problems in the subsidy policy of cultivated land fallow in China, in this paper, we put forward some suggestions on how to improve the subsidy policy in the future, those include developing dynamic goals, maximizing the subsidy benefit, making different types of subsidy, and diversifying the source of funds. According to the principle of differentiation and diversification, we also attempted to construct the conceived framework of China's fallow subsidy policy in order to provide reference for the establishment of the subsidy policy framework of cultivated land fallowing in China.