China plans to move all of its forestry workers from shanties to 50-sq-m houses by 2011, the State Forestry Administration (SFA) said yesterday.

A government subsidy of 25,000 yuan (US$3,660) will be given to all of the nearly 1 million families still living in makeshift shelters, in addition to subsidies provided by employers that will vary in amount, the administration said.

Forestry workers will only have to pay half price for new houses, which will cost 1,200 yuan per sq m, it said.

About 40 billion yuan worth of building materials will be needed to construct the new houses over the coming three years, the SFA said.

"The move will improve forestry workers' living conditions and boost domestic demand," administration director Wang Qianjun said.

Construction of the first batch of 156,700 houses, costing the government 2.35 billion yuan, started last month and is slated for completion in October.

Wang said the job will require 170,000 tons of steel, 1.3 million tons of cement and 230,000 cu m of wood, costing 7 billion yuan in total.

Two more groups of houses will be built later, but the timeframe has not yet been set, he added.

But some forestry workers may not be able to afford a new home even with the subsidies, SFA's deputy director Yan Zheng said.

Many forestry farms have decreased their wood output by more than 60 percent, leading to a drop in workers' incomes. Some of them now earn only one-third of the average urban worker's salary, Yan said.

"Improving these people's lives is an arduous and long-term undertaking," Yan said, adding that most forestry workers dreamed of moving out of their shacks, which usually do not have regular water or electricity supplies.

China has 6 million forestry workers, a third of whom rely on local governments' minimum living subsidies.

(China Daily April 17, 2009)