LAST week's Oriental Morning Post carried an article headlined "The countdown to the vanishing of the last piece of farm field within the Inner Ring" (Shanghai Daily published a photo on Friday).

The farmland in question, measuring around 1,000 square meters, lies in the Yangjing Neighborhood in Pudong New Area.

The news drew my particular attention because my home is also in that neighborhood.

When you consider how land prices have skyrocketed in recent years, a piece of land in a prime downtown area still dedicated to farming could only be an eyesore and an incongruity.

It's even an insult to the chiseled skyline our officials have so carefully crafted.

If anything, the degree of our prosperity today can be safely measured by our distance to the farm, or to the land.

But in America, the land of prosperity, there is a move to locally grown produce.

Organic produce from urban farming enhances health, the farming creates green jobs and reconnects people to their food and land.

In this process known as "relocalization", there is fresh appreciation of the importance of self-sufficiency, which begins with growing food locally.

The prosperity we have been witnessing in recent decades is fueled by a process called globalization, which is in every sense the opposite of localization.

In this process goods made in China are transported thousands of miles to overseas destinations, and remain very cheap.

This can only be made possible by cheap labor, cheap resources, and cheap fuel.

As none of the these factors is sustainable, we should anticipate a deglobalization process before long.

The real trouble with modern Chinese is that not only urbanites have lost their touch with the soil, but also the next generation of peasants is fleeing from the soil.

They are put off by the hardships and uncertainties of rustic life, and lured by the glare and anonymity of cities, even though very few of them end up being absorbed into sectors of growth.

On March 7, at the 4th session of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), CPPCC member Wang Ping said that "we should not encourage our village children to go to college, for once in college, they would never return home, and failure to return to one's native place is a veritable tragedy."

Anyone familiar with China's rural situation should agree that the real problem with peasants is not about their going to college but about their migration to cities, which should be reversed.

Reality check

And the people who should be most anxious about this process should be government officials, rather than just Wang, a museum curator.

But at this time, our officials are too mesmerized by the growth-enabling capacity of cheap labor to be distracted by what is really happening in the countryside.

As a matter of fact, for governments, the secret to fueling growth is to first acquire land, then turn it over to property developers, which involves astronomical land use fees.

It is reported that during the annual NPC/CPPCC sessions, one delegate from Beijing said that a newly appointed county magistrate in Beijing, after eagerly consulting the books, found to his dismay that his predecessor had already sold out all the land.

Those officials who still have land at their disposal are confronted with a similar dilemma: the recent curbs on the property market drastically dampen real estate developers' enthusiasm to bid for land at ever higher prices, raising concerns about local governments' solvency.

According Ye Jiannong, a CPPCC member, the current practice of levying a land use fee once for 70 years should be replaced by an annual land tax.

Ye said that according to statistics, from 2003 to 2010, China's GDP grew 1.9 times, while average urban income rose 1.3 times, the average housing price jumped three times, and land sales income soared five times.

In this land grant procedure, the incumbent government can levy a 70-year land use fee.

By right that income for 70 years should be shared by succeeding governments for the next 70 years, but current governments have strong incentives to make exclusive use of it and spend it all, before the next government.

Home buyers, too, must pay one-time land use fee for 70 years, though that could be more reasonably spread over a 70-year period. This fee contributes to surging home prices.

Ye anticipated that the strongest resistance to the tax scheme would be from local governments, whose revenues would be seriously compromised.

According to Finance Minister Xie Xuren, addressing a press conference at the recent parliamentary sessions, last year's total land sales revenues were 2.9 trillion yuan (US$442 billion), up 106 percent over 2009, equal to 35 percent of total government revenues in 2010.

There is every reason to be concerned.

"The practice [for governments to be] financed by land sales has clearly come to a dead end ... How much land do you still have left?" asked Li Yining, an economist.

But everything becomes complicated at an age when growth is an overriding priority, stated or otherwise.

Resolution

And when growth is pegged to such social stabilizers as employment, it could easily become a mandate.

Wang Mingquan, a NPC deputy, was well aware of this plight when he said, "Curbing land sales revenues would dampen local economic growth, but rising land sales would make it hard not to overstep the minimum 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) of arable land." The government believes that amount of farmland is needed to ensure China's food security.

Wang did show his perspicacity in saying, "While income is resilient, expenditure is rigid, and it is impossible to bring down high expenditure when it has already gone up."

This reminds me of a historian's observations that it is much easier to switch from a life of frugality to luxury, than the other way round.

If anyone doubts this, just review the tinkering with China's official cars system.

NPC deputy Ye Qing from Hubei Province said that since 2003 he has been proposing reforms in official car use for eight consecutive years, with little effect.

Clearly what our government lacks is not proposals, but resolution.