China will stick with policies to maintain food self-sufficiency and protect farmland from urban encroachment while pledging to deepen its reforms in rural areas.

A meeting of the Party attended by President Xi Jinping said China will continue to ensure that at least 120 million hectares of rural land would be reserved for agricultural use, a policy known as the “red line.”

Prominent researchers and economists had called on the government to abandon the “red line” and have also said it should relax its long-standing self-sufficiency target of 95 percent and make better use of global markets. While the report did not mention the 95 percent figure, it said self-supply would remain the key to China’s efforts to “seize the initiative on food security.”