Former deputy mayor of Chongqing Gan Yuping raised the spectre of social unrest erupting among disgruntled farmers thrown deeper into poverty and expected to eke out a living on inferior, steeply sloped land after resettlement in the Three Gorges reservoir area.

He called the problems surrounding rural resettlement "enormous," and said these included a "dramatic decline in farmland" and poor agricultural conditions in the resettlement zone.

Mr. Gan, who is vice-director of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, said that most rural migrants who have been relocated in the reservoir area are still better off than before their displacement. But, he noted, at this point they are continuing to work the fertile farmland that lies below the 135-metre mark. This land is due to be submerged in June.

Much of the new land the migrants have been assigned is rugged, steep, unirrigated and prone to frequent natural disasters such as drought and hailstorms, he said.

Mr. Gan made his comments in a report submitted to the annual Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference session, which opened in Beijing last week. (The Chongqing Morning Post interviewed Mr. Gan for a story published on March 2, and the Three Gorges Project Daily carried a longer report, focusing on the document he submitted to the CPPCC, on March 5.)

Mr. Gan said that rural resettlement in particular is a major challenge facing Chongqing authorities, who so far have moved 262,000 rural migrants, 95,000 of whom have gone to distant parts of the country.

In general, those who stayed in the reservoir area have fared best, he said. Even so, migrants in Wanzhou, Fuling and Fengdu are being given only half as much land as they had before resettlement. The per-capita land allotment in those areas is "much lower than the basic standard set by the resettlement authorities," Mr. Gan said.

In Wushan, migrants complain that the grain yield from land they have been assigned on the newly cleared slopes on higher ground is only half what they can get from the farmland that is soon to be flooded.

In general, migrants are extremely worried that their incomes will plummet after they lose access to this good land in June, Mr. Gan said.

The expansion of farmland and the construction of new settlements in the Three Gorges area in recent years have led to a growing soil-erosion problem. To relieve the pressure on the region’s fragile ecosystem, in 1999 Premier Zhu Rongji announced a policy shift in favour of relocating 125,000 of the people to be displaced by the dam to distant parts of the country.

Migrants who agree to move to remote locations have been offered twice as much money as those who remain in the reservoir area. However, despite the costlier resettlement packages offered to the "distant migrants," Beijing has not increased the total budget earmarked for Three Gorges resettlement.

With resettlement funds from the central government falling short, local authorities in the Three Gorges area, one of the country’s most impoverished regions, have been unable to afford job-creation and other programs to help needy migrants, Mr. Gan said.

The Chongqing municipal government is taking steps to rectify the problems, he said. These measures include expansion of the resettlement zone to make more arable land available to migrants, along with efforts to improve the poor soil quality in the new farming areas and to strictly control population growth in the region.

But these local efforts are far from sufficient, Mr. Gan insisted. He argued for a massive injection of money from the central government to help develop the regional economy, create jobs, build irrigation systems, and prevent geological disasters.

"We call on the state to extend the relevant policies far beyond 2010, when they have suggested that they might be withdrawn," Mr. Gan said.

In the absence of more funding from Beijing, "it will be extremely difficult for local governments to promote migrants’ standard of living and maintain social stability in the reservoir area," he warned.