Specialized laws protect arable land and strengthen the foundation of food security

Recently, the Law of the People's Republic of China on Cultivated Land Protection and Quality Improvement was reviewed and adopted by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and will take effect on January 1, 2027. Focusing on cultivated land protection and quality improvement, this law is the first specialized legislation in China's cultivated land protection field. It aims to safeguard the red line for cultivated land through the rule of law and provide more solid institutional support for national food security. The article points out that cultivated land is the foundation of grain production. In recent years, China has kept the area of cultivated land stable and even increased it through a series of protection measures, laying the conditions for continued bumper harvests. However, at the grassroots level, problems still remain, such as cultivated land lying fallow, an imbalanced planting structure, and weak infrastructure, which affect the efficiency of cultivated land use and grain production capacity. The new law not only emphasizes safeguarding the baseline of cultivated land quantity, but also places importance on improving cultivated land quality, promoting coordinated progress in tasks such as the remediation of degraded cultivated land, the transformation of salinealkali land, and the construction of highstandard farmland. At the same time, the law further tightens responsibilities, strengthens supervision, improves accountability mechanisms, and promotes the shift of cultivated land protection from passive control to systematic governance and proactive quality improvement.