Tibet to complete forest rights reform in 5 years

Tibet Autonomous Region will generally complete the reform of the collective forest usage rights system over the next five years in order to gradually form a sound collective forest development mechanism and achieve its goals of increasing forest resources, boosting revenues of agricultural and pastoral farmers, preserving the ecology and maintaining the harmony in forest areas.

Padma Choling, chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government, said under the precondition of keeping the collective forest land ownership unchanged, Tibet will allocate the rights to forest land contractual management as well as the forest ownership to rural households of collective economic organizations by implementing the household-based forest land contract system. This will give agricultural and pastoral farmers the long-term and guaranteed rights to forest land contractual management, according to the news from a forest work conference of Tibet held on June 17,

In the process of implementing the reform of collective forest usage rights system, Tibet will allocate the usage rights to each household and divide the forest ownership to each individual resident in order to ensure that all residents have their own share of forest ownership. Meanwhile, Tibet will ensure that agricultural and pastoral farmers should receive the majority of the forest land-usage rights and forest ownership during the distribution.

In April 2009, Tibet officially initiated the pilot collective forest usage rights reform and has completed the boundary settlement and ownership affirmation work in five pilot prefectures and cities and in six towns and townships. The boundaries for 36,507 mu of forest in pilot areas have been settled and all the forest ownership has been affirmed. The forest ownership registration and certificate issuance is also underway as scheduled.

As one of China's five major regions rich in forest resources, Tibet's forest areas total 14.6 million hectors and its standing forest stock stands at 2.3 billion cubic meters, ranking first across the country. Tibet has preserved a sound ecological situation for the "sources of rivers" and "sources of ecology" in China and Asia.