Chinese farmers to increase income gap between rural and urban areas by more than 8%

China News agency, Beijing, April 20--despite a series of measures, the income gap between urban and rural areas continues to widen.　　In a report released today, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts that the income ratio of urban and rural residents will expand further to 3.35:1 in 2010. In 2009, the net income per capita of Chinese farmers exceeded the 5000 yuan mark for the first time, reaching 5153 yuan, the actual growth of 8.5%. But urban and rural income ratios increased by 0.02 from a year earlier to 3.33:1.　　In that year, urban and rural income difference was 12022 yuan.　　The annual Green Paper, entitled "Analysis and prediction of rural economic situation in China", predicts that farmers ' per capita net income will exceed 5500 yuan in 2010, with an increase of more than 8%, in the context of increased agricultural subsidies, higher prices for agricultural products and increasing farmers ' non-farm employment opportunities. The Green Paper also predicts that the per capita disposable income of urban residents will reach 19,000 yuan this year.　　In recent years, China's urban residents per capita disposable income increased rapidly, from 2007 to 2009, the average annual new income of 1805 yuan. China's rural development faces hard constraints on arable land, fresh water and other natural resources, Zhao, an official at the central Rural work leadership group, said at the Green Paper Conference.　　The difficulty of financing and loan is the bottleneck of agricultural rural development.　　One of the main authors of the Green Paper, Li Zhou, deputy director of the Institute of Rural Development of the Academy of Social Sciences, cautioned that China's rural development should pay attention to the problems of unequal trade and the path of urban-rural integration construction in the process of non-agricultural land farming.　　He said that the pursuit of tax maximization, and to attract investment as the basic means of local government and the pursuit of profit maximization, and the occupation of agricultural land as a basic means of the Entrepreneur Alliance, resulting in the land non-agricultural caused a lot of conflicts. The scholar believes that the improvement of the government's macro policies and the proper response of farmers to the market are the two major forces driving China's agriculture and rural Development.　　But in reality there is a tendency to emphasize the role of the former, so as to ignore the role of farmers and market mechanisms. He suggested that market-oriented measures should be used more fully in the process of rural development in China. The Government's responsibility is to create a macro-policy environment that can make the cake bigger by protecting legal property rights, safeguarding fair competition and providing public goods. He also stressed that "local governments cannot be the biggest beneficiaries of land use changes".