China, a developing economy and a major food importing and exporting country, provides us with an extremely interesting example of the complexity and the rising challenges of agricultural modernization . The country, which has to feed almost 20 percent of the world population with only 7 percent of the world arable land, needs sufficient amounts of agricultural commodities at a tolerable price, as the share of food is still high in total consumers spending.1 Meanwhile, the growing urban middle class is asking for new types of food diet. The resulting stimulation of the national oil and meat consumption has effects on the demand for land intensive products, such as feed and oilseeds. Since the country became a net importer of food in 2004, its agricultural balance has become heavier every day.
Considering the demographic weight of China, the stakes go well beyond the Chinese territory. The growing food insecurity of the country could have disastrous consequences on global food markets and, in the end, on other importing countries. The risks are also substantial for China. Despite the fact that its massive trade surplus theoretically balances rising food imports, relying on global markets for food would put the country’s population at greater risk in terms of price volatility. As a consequence, tackling issues related to food security has turned into a real priority for the Chinese government.
The government, urged to implement effective agricultural development and food security policies , has reshaped its political agenda since the beginning of the 2000s, putting agricultural development and food security back to the forefront of its political priorities. This represents a major shift away urban and industrial development, which was the most important focus of the last decades of the twentieth century, as a major source of growth both in urban and rural areas (Oi 1999; Lin et al. 2000).
But how to frame agricultural development and food security policies in the twenty-first century? Productivist agricultural practices that have prevailed over the past decades already started deteriorating arable land and water in China, putting even more pressure on already scarce but essential resources for the sustainability of agricultural production on the middle- and long-term. Is the awareness of the government of these issues likely to trigger a policy response and to make agricultural practices evolve toward more sustainable farming practices in China—using less water, less pesticides, and chemical fertilizers and offering better working conditions to farmers? Is an alternative pathway, environmentally and socially more sustainable, likely to become reality in the near future? These are some of the questions this book wishes to address.
1.1 Agricultural Transitions, in the Past and Today
What are
agricultural transitions? Characterizing change has always been a challenging task, as change encompasses a wide variety of political, social, and economic dimensions. When it comes to agricultural change, a large body of literature exists that helps to better assess it. The different bodies of literature on agricultural transition do not necessarily refer to the same notions of transition. At least four different corpuses can be distinguished, which depict different transition processes, sometimes overlapping. A first corpus focuses on agricultural transitions in socialist and communist economies evolving toward market economies (Swinnen and Rozelle
2006). A second one focuses on agricultural transitions in developing countries, where agricultural modernization is usually depicted as the first step of an economic development path entitled the “Lewis” path—although this has recently been put back into question (Dorin et al.
2013), as we will see later in this book. This second corpus developed a lot during the spread of the
Green Revolution in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—an agricultural development paradigm aimed at increasing yields through the use of high-yielding varieties, chemical fertilizers and agrochemicals such as pesticides and herbicides, and sometimes through irrigation and mechanization. A third body of literature—sometimes associated with the one on agricultural modernization in developing countries—concentrates on agricultural transitions in a given country (usually a developing economy) willing to integrate international markets (usually for World Trade Organization [WTO] integration purposes). Finally, a last body of literature focuses on agricultural transition toward more productive
and more sustainable models (Table
1.1).
Table 1.1Different definitions for “agricultural transition”
| | Definition 1 | Definition 2 | Definition 3 | Definition 4 |
|---|
Country/economy | Socialist/communist economies | Developing countries | Developing countries | Developed and developing economies |
Objective | Transition to market economy | Agricultural modernization as a first step of Lewis-type economic development | Integration in international markets | Transition toward more sustainable and more productive models |
The body of literature on agricultural transitions toward more sustainable and more productive models has developed a lot over the past few years, especially since the 2007–2008 food price crisis. As a consequence of soaring food prices—in 2008, the cereal price index reached a peak 2.8 times higher than in 2000 (United Nations 2011: 62)—an estimated 44 million people were driven into poverty (World Bank 2011), and many countries were confronted to major social and political crises. Six years after the food price crisis, agricultural issues are still to be addressed, both in developing and in developed countries. The question of how to provide food, at a decent price, to 9 billion people by 2050, is a matter of intense debates and an important number of people and organizations have been urging countries to raise their agricultural productivity levels. However, in a context where arable land and water resources are limited and already eroded by the rising needs of urbanization and industrialization, agricultural intensification has turned into an additional threat to the sustainable use of these resources. As a consequence, a growing number of people and organizations advocate in favor of a transition toward more sustainable agriculture. The debate seems to have polarized around two extremes: the advocates of productivism, for whom the main goal of agricultural policies should be to raise production levels in order to feed the ever-increasing world population, and the proponents of environmental protection, for whom the implementation of sustainable farming practices should be considered as a priority to lower the impacts of agricultural production on the environment. In reality, the array of movements is much larger than these sole two poles. Holt-Gimenez and Shattuck (2011), for instance, acknowledge at least four main categories of opposing “global food movements ”: the “neoliberal” one, the “reformist” one, the “progressive” one, and the “radical” one. While the neoliberal movement is based upon a discourse oriented toward corporate and global markets and giving priority to “food enterprises”, the reformist movement , on its side, gives priority to food security, development, and aid. The progressive movement, primarily based in northern countries, relies on a “food justice discourse ” that promotes the development of local foodsheds, family farming, and access to fresh and affordable food, with a strong emphasis on direct rural–urban linkages and alternative business models that insist on social rather than individual (consumers’) responses to food regime failings. Finally, the radical movement, which endorses some of the elements of the progressive movement, advocates in favor of deep and structural changes of agriculture and food systems toward more sustainability, more fairness, more sovereignty, and more security.
In China, the debate between productivism and sustainability is vivid. The government, which long had to deal with insufficient resources, clearly keeps on attaching fundamental importance to the capacity of the territory to supply the demand of the population. On the other side, rural industrialization and intensive agriculture had dramatic consequences on soil, water and on the safety of food products. Environmental protection recently emerged as a strongly debated element for the pathway which the agricultural sector is embarking on. Internationally, debates on the new pathways of agricultural development and transition have intensified, especially since the food crisis of 2007–2008. The question of which path should agricultural modernization take is thus not unique to China. Exploring the modalities of agricultural transition pathways in China provides substantial elements for the understanding of the building of national agricultural pathways worldwide.
1.2 A Need for Socio-Political Approaches
While the productivist paradigm of the Green Revolution was mostly based on the spread of technology aimed at improving yield and farmers’ income, the current paradigm of “sustainable agriculture” is way more complex and diverse. The question of the adoption of more sustainable farming practices is not about addressing short-term economic issues anymore, and cruelly needs sociological answers. What makes farmers adopt more sustainable practices, of which the benefits are sometimes only seen on the long term? Which lock-ins prevent the transformation of agriculture toward more sustainable systems?
A solid literature is currently developing on the subject, particularly on the lock-ins created by agricultural “technological pathways”. David (1985) demonstrated that irreversibilities due to technical interrelatedness, scale economies, and learning and habituation could be brought by the adoption and standardization of a technological system. Similarly, a number of agronomists have shown that escaping from agricultural systems based on technology such as chemical inputs was a slow process (...
