Jiang Yongbin, a 34-year-old worker at the Wumahe Forestry Bureau in Yichun City, Heilongjiang province, recently paid 62,901 yuan for a piece of national forest land that measures 9.3 hectares. He was very glad at the deal. "I have worked there for my whole life and dreamed of buying a piece of forest land of my own. Now I will devote all of my time thinking how I can run my forest well," he told our reporter.

An official from the Ministry of Forestry (MOF) declared last Thursday in Beijing that beginning that day MOF had officially kicked off a trial plan in the Yichun city in Heilongjiang, transferring the operational right of the forests to individuals. This signifies that the state's forest operation reform has started. By contracting forest land to individuals, it is expected that forest resources could be operated in a sustainable way and workers on the forest fields could improve their living standard.

The Yichun city is nicknamed the forest city in China. China's earliest national forest fields were set up here and it is also the most important timber production center in China. Since 1948, it has produced a total of 230 million cubic meters of timber for the country. However, due to long-term overexploitation, since the late 1980s, most of the exploitable timber resources have been exploited and operation of the forest fields has landed in difficult circumstances.

As the first step for the trial plan, the municipal government in Yichun will allocate 80,000 hectares out of the total 4 million hectares of forest land to individuals to operate, and the contract will last for 50 years. The contractor will own the forest and will have the right to handle, re-transfer, inherit or sell the land.

According to Yichun city mayor Xu Zhaojun, by transferring the land to forest workers, their interest will be closely linked with the state's interest, and contractors may use the money to do whatever they want. Under this system, it is hoped that the phenomenon in which workers do not care about the growing status of the woods they planted will disappear.

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