OREANDA-NEWS. More than 30 years ago, the village of Xiaogang in East China's Anhui province started a nationwide rural reform, with the introduction of the household contract responsibility system. The province continues to lead the country in a new land reform nowadays as a National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) survey shows fresh ways of transferring the right to the use of farmland emerge here.

In addition to such traditional transfers as sub-contracting and leasing, rural land is run in the form of cooperatives or shares, the NBS said. In Nianpan, a village in Suzhou in the north of the province, local planters' co-ops develop large-scale operations by transferring farmers'contracted land under certain share-holding system. Shexian county in South Anhui' s Huangshan, also designated as the "proving ground" of the reform, has seen the land-use rights of 1,287 mu (85.8 hectares) of fields transferred to shareholders.

Meanwhile, the survey indicates farmers are profiting more from the reform as their land is transferring at an increasingly higher price.

A mechanism is being set up to normalize rural land transfer. The NBS says in the survey that there is continuous improvement on the market-oriented land transfer system, under which two sides involved in a deal negotiate the price based on an analysis of supply and demand and of economic returns, before reaching an agreement.

As one of China's major grain-growing provinces, Anhui expects a bumper harvest this year, according to the survey. Its grain output will hit 34.16 million tons, representing a year-on-year rise of 4.2 percent.