A view of Ningde city, East China's Fujian Province Photo: VCG

Shanghai's natural resources inspector summoned Ningde city in East China's Fujian Province, requiring the strict local implementation of regulatory measures to protect arable land and rectify serious problems including the non-agricultural-use of its arable land, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Monday.

From October to December 2022, the Shanghai Bureau of the Natural Resources Inspector sent a team to Fujian, determining that the illegal and irregular problems concerning the arable land in the city were widespread, with ineffective supervision and lax law enforcement on curbing new illegal land use.

In addition, local officials ignored ecological protection when selecting supplementary arable land project site, and illegally disposed sand and gravel in resource construction projects.

The Shanghai inspector required Ningde to firmly and steadily promote the rectification of the highlighted problems in accordance with the law, and strictly implement regulatory measures for the arable land protection, and actively build a long-term mechanism for the protection of arable land.

The government of the city said that it will face up to the problems pointed out in the summon, and carry out comprehensive rectification and promote the improvement of the long-term mechanism for the protection of farmland and natural resources enforcement and supervision.

Ningde is a city home to major industries such as lithium-ion battery manufacturing which has been riding high on the boom of China's buoyant new-energy vehicle (NEV) industry.

China's automobile battery titan Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) was born in this city, which remained the world's largest vehicle battery maker for six consecutive years.

In 2022, Ningde's lithium-ion new-energy sector achieved an output value of 275.8 billion yuan ($40.7 billion), a jump of 74.6 percent from 2021, driving an increase of 20.3 percentage points in the industrial added value and becoming the city's first industrial cluster that exceeded 200 billion yuan in revenue.

Boosted by its industrial advantages, Ningde's economic output reached 355.4 billion yuan last year, up 10.7 percent year-on-year, much higher than the national average of 3 percent. 

Global Times