This week in class we talked about sustainable agriculture: what it means in China, how the Chinese are implementing or working on creating a more sustainable food supply, as well as its position in the hierarchy of environmental issues. I mainly talked about Richard Sanders’s article, “A Market Road to Sustainable Agriculture?” and made some additional notations, while Vishal discussed a couple of the other articles. Unfortunately, we did not get around to the posing or discussion of many questions this week, but I will here summarize the main thrust of what I covered in class, as well as some issues that arose that relate to our course in general.
Richard Sanders points out that the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, such as the Household Responsibility System (in which farmers have land use rights but not ownership), led to a more polluted environment in many regions, especially in rural areas (thereby affecting the state of cultivated or arable land). For instance, as land was deserted or neglected by farmers—who now had the choice of what to do with their land—going to work in the growing number of factories, the importation of chemicals into the countryside to make up for the lost labour (both in terms of hours put into the land, as well as in term of pairs of hands) increased. Like in many of the environmental histories we’ve discussed so far in our class, in the case of agriculture, modifications that led to the diminishment of poverty also led to the degradation of natural resources: up until 2003 (the last year of values given in the article) and likely after, the amount and proportion of chemical fertilizers applied to farmland continually and rapidly increased. And in the decade prior to 2003, this increase was accompanied by almost no change in the grain yields and a decrease grain harvest per ton of chemical fertilizer! China has an addiction to chemical inputs for agriculture, much greater than that the US or the world average (in 1997, China applied an average of 271kg of fertilizer per hectare of land, whereas the US applied 111kg and the world averaged 94kg [see Gale table in slideshow]). China has been working to combat this excessive and improper use of chemicals in agriculture since the late 1970s through a series of government programs of varying success. The most popular program thus far, though—the Ministry of Agriculture Green Food initiative of AA standard—allows for the restricted use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Full organic has barely made a dent in the total hectares cultivated in China (see “Current Situation” slide in slideshow), and the organizations charged with promoting organic or even “impure” organic are tiny (ex. the China Organic Food Development Centre [OFDC], relegated the leading role for the development of organic agriculture, had a staff of 15 in 2002).
Sanders recommends continued institutional support of organic in China, but is the support in the manner China is currently providing enough? Should the government increase its aid, or does the government have bigger fish to fry and need to pursue the resolution or amelioration of other pressing concerns before organic? Is organic really even a viable option, or should the government concentrate more on just diminishing the rampant overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides? These questions are hard to answer, but the fact that the market for full organic in China is so small (due to per capita average incomes and an improving environmental consciousness but one that remains without an organized movement) suggests that affluence in China needs to increase before organic can really be economically viable by itself (most full organic in China is exported, but if growers/processors/enterprises were able to make a profit domestically there would be more of a financial incentive). And if China wishes to move closer to organic or at least have a few more Mha that don’t put the same amount of stress on the environment, soil that most farmers currently are putting on the land, the government probably needs to find some way to pump up backing.
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