SHANGHAI, China (AP) – Land conflicts, unstable prices and backward conditions in China’s farm sector are threatening the country’s stability and its food supply, Premier Wen Jiabao said in unusually blunt remarks published yesterday.

Sustainable development and national stability depend on resolving such problems, Wen said in the text of a speech carried in major state-run newspapers.

His comments underscore rising concern over lagging economic growth in the countryside, home to at least two of every three Chinese. Stagnating rural incomes have created an underclass of impoverished farmers lacking affordable access to basic public services such as health care and education.

One of the greatest threats to stability stems from seizures of farmland for property development and other construction projects, said Wen, No. 3 in the Communist Party hierarchy.

“In some areas, illegal seizures of farmland without reasonable compensation and resettlement have provoked uprisings; this is still a key source of instability in rural areas and even the whole society,” Wen said.

Such seizures are draining the supply of farmland in a country where even with bumper harvests grain output is failing to keep pace with rising demand.

Just as significantly, seizures have provoked thousands of protests among farmers outraged over the loss of what they viewed as their most fundamental asset – the means to make a living.

Such protests have grown increasingly widespread and violent in recent years, despite the central government’s demand for local officials to end abuses and resolve conflicts peacefully.

Since taking power three years ago, China’s leaders have stressed their commitment to bettering incomes and living conditions for the rural population who helped bring the Communists to power in 1949.