About 2 million hectares of arable land are abandoned from farming each year, China Central Television reported Monday, citing a survey by the Ministry of Land and Resources.
The abandonment was attributed to the huge migration of rural labor to cities, the report said.
Thanks to the huge income gap between the rural and urban areas, many people from rural areas are choosing to leave villages to more developed cities and areas to work, said Zhang Fengtian, professor at the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development of Beijing-based Renmin University.
The outflow of young labor from rural areas really benefits the economic development of East China, which is more developed than the inland, but on the other hand, such an outflow of labor, including those with technological abilities, has become a big problem in rural development, said Li Qiang, dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University.
