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Brick kilns used to make clay are responsible for the destruction of arable lands equivalent to the size of a medium-sized county each year, said an inspector from the Ministry of Land and Resources on Sunday.

Inspector Liu Renfu made these remarks at a forum on land conservation and farming safeguards held to mark National Land Day which falls every year on June 25.

While brick kilns are built to fuel the clay needs of local areas, this often comes at the detriment of farmlands, which are either occupied or wholly destroyed by these intruders. Every year, China manufactures 800 billion bricks, at the cost of 60 million tons of coal and 100,000 hectares of farmland. Considering that China's entire arable land mass amounts to 120 million hectares, a worrying picture begins to be painted. It transcends into a tragic chef d'oeuvre because the national per capita area is a mere 0.09 hectare, the lowest in the world at 40 percent below the global average. The inspector railed against clay consumption, stating it acted in opposition to the national sustainable development strategy which focuses on land protection and energy saving.

Statistics show China has occupied 1.75 million hectares of arable land for production and construction and let more than 6.7 million hectares of cultivated land revert to its natural state from 1998 to 2006. The agricultural reconstruction has consumed more than 1.8 million hectares and another 600,000 hectares have been destroyed during the eight years. Although 3.2 million hectares has been added through land reclamation and consolidation, it is still austere for China to stick to the bottom line of 1.2 billion hectares of farmland in near future.

Meanwhile, certain local governments are blithely pursuing their own economic agendas and construction plans, allowing control measures such as land protection legislation, examinations and land use approval mechanisms to fall by the wayside, added Liu. 

Policy makers are faced with a knotty dilemma between protecting dwindling arable land while also maintaining a steady flow of materials for economic construction. An answer may lie in the optimization of industrial scraps recycling into new building materials, Liu pointed out. In recent years, success has been seen in this light with over 30,000 clay brick kilns being shut down while the use of new bricks made from environmentally-friendly materials has risen by 10 percent, a move credited with saving over 93,000 hectares of land, according to Liu.

(China Youth Daily, translated by Li Shen for China.org.cn, June 26, 2007)