Recently, the Department of Natural Resources of Zhejiang Province and the Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of Zhejiang Province issued the “Notice on Resolutely Curbing Illegal Occupation of Farmland to Build Houses in Rural Areas”, requiring all localities to rely on the “Three Renovations and One Demolition” platform for the prevention and control of illegal buildings and law enforcement comprehensive supervision platform, to give full play to the role of township governments, sub-district offices, village (residential) committees and grassroots governance grids, and to use satellite remote sensing monitoring, daily inspections, reporting clues, petitions and public opinion analysis, etc., to promptly discover and severely punish new illegal occupation of cultivated land in accordance with laws and regulations.

The “Notice” emphasizes resolutely curbing the illegal occupation of cultivated land to build houses, and adhering to the “no tolerance” attitude to deal with newly-occupied permanent basic farmland to build houses, to occupy large areas of cultivated land illegally to build houses, to illegally build houses on circulated cultivated land, to Illegally construct houses on contracted cultivated land, to make unauthorized use of cultivated land for illegal construction of houses, and to occupy cultivated land illegally for building houses by violating “one household, one house” regulations, and to illegally sell and illegally approve the appropriation of cultivated land for building houses. All these illegal activities must be severely punished in accordance with laws and regulations, by demolishing and confiscating illegal buildings, by restoring farming within a time limit, and by holding those concerned accountable. Methods such as investigation and punishment, supervision of the settling of major cases in a given time, and public notification must be adopted to promptly deal with and eliminate the newly-increased illegal occupation of cultivated land and illegal housing construction.