#china background

HKU 2013-10-29 李大维，同耕

On Monday David Li gave a generous presentation in Hong Kong University Shanghai Study Centre on his ideas about agriculture and growing food. Some notes from there, that I find also give nice background to China of nowadays.

1 Since chairman Mao, there has been in effect a policy in every city must provide 70 % of its food from within city limits. It comes from no specific wisdom, but chairman Mao’s paranoia. Resulting from that, China has a distance advantage, that most of western countries don’t have - within 30 miles one can always reach real production farm. The policy is hard to change, as it comes from the great helmsman himself.

2 Income gap. Now, a farmer earns generally 3000 yuan per mu (1mu=666 sqm) a year. To make living i.e. to earn at last 60K, he must farm at least 20 mu. That gives us a basic farm size. The income farmers earn with their high risk business is very small compared to urbanites.

3 In USA, urban farms are growing more and more popular. Best managed urban farm is in Milwaukee. Targets : occupying abandoned factories, giving job and activity to youth and of course providing tasty food.

4 Western style farmers markets don’t work in China, as most of food is already grown locally. Industrial farming or urbanization are not so big threats here, as the 70 percent rule is really hard to change. There is also policy : machines should not push the farmer out of his land.

4 Chinese farmers are currently trapped in using fertilizers and pesticides, as WTO policies do not allow countries subsidize it’s farming, but it is possible to manipulate raw agricultural chemistry raw materials, thus making pesticides highly affordable. Because of low income farmers cannot afford to skip a single money cycle to experiment with different approaches.

5 Nóngmín-nóngcūn-nóngyè problem and Family Farm reform. Xi Jinping’s administration started off in 2013 with their period guidelines “Document One” setting as top priority introducing farmland property for the farmers families during the next decades.

6 What if we grow our vegetables ourselves? That is the idea David is promoting - to give people chance to grow one’s food itself and thus also take down the local farmers risk. The idea is to pay the farmer generously to rent a small piece of their land and use it to grow your own food, using also local labour. Because of huge income gap between farmers and urbanites, this cooperation can be mutually very beneficial. One 200 sqm greenhouse is enough to provide food for 10 conservative people. Partly is this achieved also by reducing the amount usually going to waste in commercial networks.

7 Happy farm movement four years ago showed, that urbanites cannot be attracted with plain traditional farming. They start but lose interest, when given a till or plough. Alternative practiced show there is no need to actually do the tilling etc. Instead, one can efficiently use other methods and planning - biodynamics, aquponics, natural farming, soil food webs, just name it. There is already one biodynamic farm in Shanghai, also have an experimental zone in Songjiang and Jinze commune in Zhejiang province.

8 David is currently looking forward for partners and volunteers to go oht and rent greenhouses. The greenhouses have to be ready in February for early planting. Contact Taweili / gmail