In 1950s, collective farming system was introduced across China, making rural land ownership ‘collective’, in an unsuccessful economic experiment. In 1978, households of Xiaogang village, Fenyang County of Anhui Province de-collectivised their land contract rights from the collective to individual households. The subsequent rural land reforms allowed households to assume individual control over agricultural output, therefore increasing agricultural output dramatically across the nation.

In 1992, as part of the continuous reform, urban residents were provided with the opportunity to sign 70-year on land, whose ownership still belonged to the state. While such reform resulted in boom in urban economic activities (thus urban income), rural residents’ property rights are not clearly defined, one of the contributing factors to the widening urban-rural wealth gap.

Another result was, as China is rapidly urbanising, the demand on rural land for industrial and residential use kept growing, not only putting pressure on food security, but also creating lots of conflicts because of the unclearly defined rural land rights.

Eight provincial rural land registration pilots were initiated by the Ministry of Agriculture, with the Feidong project being one of them. The experiment differs from the other pilots in two areas: firstly, clear & accurate mapping and delineating of every household’s unconnected land parcels; and secondly, the application of modern land management systems and geospatial technologies to support the capture and maintenance of land data.

The pilot was undertaken by Feidong County Government with funding from United States Trade & Development Agency (USTDA). A consortium of US technology companies, led by International Land Systems, participated in the planning and implementation of the project.

Compared to geospatial information for urban areas, rural mapping is easier as it requires less accuracy and does not have many vertical layers. However, the project team faced three main challenges:

First was the lack of adequate records and processes. Existing land registration certificates were last issued in 1995 without detailed map or records to allow quick collection and documentation of land information. Therefore a new registry workflow process was needed, with digital technologies assisting the process.

Second challenge was how to scale. Parcels owned by particular households were disconnected and scattered throughout the village, and the average aggregated land-holding of each household in the province is less than two-thirds of a hectare. Anhui province alone has 13 million rural households. Mapping out the parcels with high accuracy requires lots of time and budget, and how to scale the project without daunting investment was presented as a key challenge.

Thus the third challenge, which is cost controlling. Not only technological methods were employed for the project, economic modelling techniques were applied to thoroughly analyse, understand and scrutinise the cost. In addition, this also allowed the economic benefits of providing such a system to be well understood.

The pilot site included two collective villages of Yangwan and Hedong, each having on average 35 households. And the objective was to create a registry system that is easy to use, effective, and not too costly, with the most appropriate mapping methods defined.

The registry process took place between mid-august to late September 2010, with seven critical processes identified: village map creation, collective village meetings, household information collection, application examination & data entry, resolving of application errors, public announcement as well as certificate production.

The accuracy threshold defined by the Anhui Agricultural Commission was 50cm, which gave the project team a baseline to test the geospatial methods applied in the mapping process. Total station surveying and digitised imagery were used to map the villages. Handheld GPS and digitised imagery were also used to test the effects of different topographic features.

The team concluded that not one mapping method would be entirely applicable for the entire province and each method would produce errors. Therefore, the selection of methods was based on speed, cost-effectiveness, error rate and also costs of error-adjustment.

Many practical challenges were encountered during the process. Previously farmers had to pay tax for the land they cultivate, resulting in underreporting of actual land size; however, under the new scheme where registered land is more of an asset rather than liability, the totally area of agricultural land reported actually surged by more than 30 per cent.

In addition, farmers have been leveraging the empty space on the slope or near the ditch to cultivate crops and vegetable. Determining the rights for these tiny patches of land was not an easy endeavour.

There are also parcels with no clear line of demarcation or covered by thick vegetation, making digitised imagery impossible. Parcels sometimes are co-owned by relatives belonging to different households with no clear documentation of the arrangement.

While previously farmers lived by each other harmoniously, the process of accurate registration saw a lot of disputes. Workers at the village land registration committee had been specifically trained to mediate such disputes.

The data, collected on the ground, was recorded into the system at the County level, with data input clerk having the right to reject input request should the data be not up to standard. The data is hosted by a server located in the county seat and senior leaders are able to access the information through a web interface.

The project was conceived with a World Bank funded study tour in 1998, and the project team includes, in addition to ILS, Anhui Agricultural Commission, Trimble Navigation, ESRI, ESRI Canada, Landsea (formerly the Rural Development Institute), Digital Globe and Beijing Landstar Digital Technology.

Attending the final workshop which concludes the pilot project, Shao Guohe, Assistant Governor of Anhui province, expressed his gratitude to the parties working on the project.

Shao, who is very familiar with agriculture, said rural affairs are always a top priority for the government.

He added that he would expect more Chinese companies to have the technical capabilities to make scaling of the project easier.

The relevant parties are not in talks on how to scale the project to cover the whole province.