Search

In this paper I propose to diagnose the agrarian question in today?s China by looking at it through the lens of one particular group of small leaseholding-peasants in one particular locale: soybean farmers in the Northeast Chinese province of Heilongjiang, where Chinese soybean production is concentrated. In addition to using it as a platform to better understand the universal aspects of the agrarian question facing the non-horticultural peasantry of today?s China, I have targeted this case study because it includes a most telling feature: proponents of China?s WTO entry forecast a rosy future for the soybean farmers of Heilongjiang Province. Despite the fact that the terms of China?s WTO entry radically slashed tariffs on imported soybeans, the WTO cheerleaders insisted that Heilongjiang?s soybean farmers would meet the challenge for two reasons: 1) studies showed that China?s soybean production costs were slightly below world market prices, and 2) Heilongjiang?s relatively low population density would allow for productivity-enhancing enlargement of acreage/soybean farmer and machinery/soybean farmer ratios without triggering catastrophic rural-to-urban migration streams. But if China?s WTO accession has not posed any serious danger to the welfare of its soybean farmers, why then have Chinese state bureaucrats subsequently erected administrative roadblocks to the entry of imported soybeans, generating charges of non-compliance with WTO stipulations and risking the elevation of already burgeoning trade conflict with the U.S.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soybean agriculture has been an important economic activity in Brazil in the past three decades and the country is the second world exporter of soybeans. However, in spite of its dramatically growing domestic and international relevance, soybean agriculture has not been clearly associated with improvements in collective standards of wealth and welfare in Brazil. This paper examines a possible determinant of the developmental outcomes of soybean agriculture in Brazil - its relations with China, the world main importer of the product - based on information from newspapers and scientific literature and on quantitative data. We conclude that Sino-Brazilian relations in the soy world-market present elements of cooperation for international development but also some asymmetries that reproduce global hierarchies of wealth. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the preference of private ownership of land over collective ownership in China. In China, administrative redistribution of land is prohibited, but still is practiced on a large scale in villages. As Chinese peasants prefer large-scale land distribution and the factors responsible for this are: village decision-making, rural migration, local industry and wealth, and compensation for land acquisition. To analyze the effect of large-scale land redistribution on above factors thoroughly, Boolean Method has been used.

China?s fast rural industrialization and massive rural-to-urban migration are believed to have shifted the agricultural sector from involutionary expansion to real economic growth. I try to document and analyze these changes in this study and contend that, despite substantial transfer of agricultural surplus labor to non-farm employment, the real transformation of the small-peasant agrarian economy itself does not necessarily follow. The empirical data come from a recent random survey of peasant households and villages in Zhejiang Province. Both labor and land have gained mobility to allow more profit-oriented and market-mediated allocation of these factors of production. Many peasant households leased out their contracted land and moved out of farm employment to seek higher income in entrepreneurship or wage employment. At the same time, other households contracted more land to expand agricultural production. Some even ventured into large-scale managerial farming. However, the transition is far from a clear-cut one. Regression analysis shows that although non-farm wage employment does promote outflow of land, many of these peasant laborers experience ?semi-proletarianization? by still keeping at least some family land as a safety net. On the other hand, the market allocation of land leads more to the sustaining of family-farming than to the rise of capitalistic managerial farming. Although Zhejiang?s rural industrial enterprises are among the most developed in the country, it is actually accessibility to non-local or urban non-farm jobs, rather than localized industrialization, that significantly affects the likelihood of leasing out land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As smallholders in the global South engage in new ways with agricultural markets, they change their farming strategies and use of agricultural inputs. In many locales, heavy use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides gives state authorities figurative headaches and farmers actual health hazards and soil degradation. It has been argued that agricultural commercialization and urbanization generate metabolic rifts--gaps in nutrient cycling that impoverish soils and accumulate wastes. Replacement of organic with synthetic inputs is central to this dynamic. We join metabolic rift theory with livelihood analysis to examine how varying livelihood strategies differentiate input use in an area of southwest China where farming is partially commercialized. We draw on household survey data to identify five household clusters with distinct on-farm activity patterns. Regression analyses show that these farming strategies mediate effects of household and community attributes on use of synthetic fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, and organic manure fertilizer. Strategies associated with diverse on-farm crop rotations are associated with greater use of manure. Emergent tree-borne crops are associated with greater pesticide use, but new high-elevation cash crops are linked to less use of both synthetic and organic inputs. These variations have gendered impacts: women's work around compost fertilizer gives way to male-dominated synthetic input management. Our theoretical synthesis and empirical results enrich both livelihoods and metabolic rift scholarship by showing how livelihood strategies mediate political economic forces, generating heterogeneous input use. This study demonstrates the uneven processes through which metabolic rifts tear open and the necessity for soil enhancement efforts to address farmers' variegated practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study aims to analyze citizens' sustainability attitudes toward food (meat) production in the EU and China. Results point out that sustainability attitudes relate to citizens' attitudes toward farming for specific only, small social groups. The implication of this is that critical attitudes may still be expressed in the public debate and influence policy formation at national and global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study reflects on the role of history in institutional change in the context of China's agricultural reforms during the first three decades of the People's Republic of China (1949-1979). The most striking feature of institutional change during this time period is that it ended in a full circle. At the start and end point, household farming prevailed, but collectivization dominated in between, though household farming was able to make several comebacks. This experience of institutional change is interesting for at least two reasons. First, it is widely believed that the ongoing Chinese economic transition started in agriculture in 1978, when the household responsibility system was secretly tried by peasants in Anhui Province. It was then sanctioned and promoted nationwide. This official history is misleading. The household responsibility system did not come out of blue in 1978. Nor was it initially confined to one locale, only later spread throughout China by the state. To understand China's economic transition, it is imperative to put it back into the historical context. Second, the fact that institutional change came into a full circle provides a unique opportunity to re-examine the prevailing thesis of path dependence. From the path dependent perspective, institutional change is understood as a chain of events wherein some past accidental event fortuitously and irrevocably locks the course of history into a specific trajectory. While the Chinese case lends support to the broad thesis that history matters, yet, the way history matters is different from the mechanism of path dependence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]