Right now, a biting chill sweeps across the land of Qilu, yet in places like Dezhou and Rizhao, villagers are busy digging earth, building canals, laying pipes, and driving grass stakes—everywhere are the bustling scenes of winter water conservancy repair. In China's rural areas, making the most of the winter and spring slack farming seasons to carry out basic farmland water conservancy construction is a tradition. "Storing water is like storing grain; building weirs is like building granaries"—this vivid saying captures the relationship between water conservancy and agriculture. Strengthening basic farmland water conservancy construction is an urgent requirement and fundamental guarantee for deepening the structural reform of the agricultural supply side and achieving the goals of strengthening agriculture, benefiting farmers, and enriching rural residents.
The Party Central Committee and the State Council have always attached great importance to winter-spring farmland water conservancy construction. Not long ago, the State Council held a special meeting to study and deploy winter-spring farmland water conservancy construction. Since the beginning of winter, the Ministry of Water Resources, together with relevant departments, has continued to intensify policy support, investment guarantees, and reform and innovation in water conservancy, strengthened follow-up supervision of farmland water conservancy construction, focused on managing key projects and critical links such as major water conservancy project construction, high-efficiency water-saving irrigation, and irrigation district construction and supporting facilities, and conducted special supervision over fund raising, construction progress, quality supervision, and operation and maintenance in various regions.
At present, all 15 major water conservancy projects planned to start construction this year have commenced. The construction progress of large and medium-sized irrigation districts and water-saving supporting facilities renovation, large irrigation and drainage pump station renewal and renovation, and small farmland water conservancy projects has reached the best level for the same period in history. The annual task of adding 20 million mu of high-efficiency water-saving irrigation area has been completed ahead of schedule and exceeded. The rural drinking water safety consolidation and improvement project is advancing rapidly; more than 46 million rural people benefited that year, and the guaranteed supply rate of safe rural drinking water has greatly improved. Key reforms such as the river chief system and comprehensive reform of agricultural water prices have been comprehensively advanced. Reforms in farmland water conservancy, the property rights system of water conservancy projects, and water rights and water markets have been coordinated and pushed forward. Among them, the annual completion of the comprehensive reform of agricultural water prices covered more than 32 million mu of farmland irrigation area.
Building farmland water conservancy first requires establishing a diversified investment mechanism. While increasing fiscal investment and strengthening planning coordination, all regions adhere to giving play to both government and market forces. Drawing on the experience of farmland water conservancy reform in Shandong, Anhui, and other places, they improve policy measures such as replacing subsidies with awards, subsidizing after construction, fiscal interest discounts, financial support, water price reform, and tax incentives to mobilize beneficiary entities, absorb financial funds, and leverage social capital to participate in the construction, management, and operation of farmland water conservancy.
Water conservancy projects are "30 percent construction, 70 percent management." This is especially true for small farmland water conservancy projects, where more effort must be devoted to project operation and maintenance. It is understood that all regions adhere to equal emphasis on construction and management, adopting measures such as strengthening technical guidance, enhancing construction in accordance with laws and regulations, clarifying project property rights, innovating operation and maintenance mechanisms, supporting the diversified development of farmers' water user cooperative organizations, and using government purchases of services to actively explore professional and socialized property-style management of farmland water conservancy projects, thereby promoting basic farmland water conservancy construction and sound project operation.
Ju County in Shandong has for three consecutive years advanced the winter-spring farmland water conservancy construction campaign, implementing a county-wide coordinated layout, planning on a single map, conducting operations against the map, and systematically improving mountains, rivers, forests, farmland, lakes, and grasslands. At the same time, it has coordinated the advancement of key reforms such as the river chief system and water price reform, effectively promoting farmland water conservancy construction and operation management.
According to statistics, as of December 15, the national winter-spring farmland water conservancy basic construction had completed an investment of 287.1 billion yuan, 1.906 billion labor days contributed by farmers, 6.252 billion cubic meters of earth and stone work, and 164 million machine-shift units (sets), accounting for 65.7%, 61.4%, 68.1%, and 55.8% of the annual plan, respectively.