Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

Reuters reports that a cache of 21 dead babies was found near a river in the city of Jining in Shandong Province. They were dead and aborted fetuses discarded by hospital personnel. Apparently they were not buried deep enough, and some washed into the river. This story is not about agriculture and I don't usually post stories available elsewhere in English, but it's remarkably similar to the story about dead pigs posted here last week . The two stories are unrelated, but there is a disturbing parallel. The guys who dumped the pigs had the sense to remove their ear tags so they couldn't be traced, but many of these babies still had tags identifying them, their mothers' names, and bed number. One was labeled "medical refuse."

One of China's big challenges now being debated is how to urbanize. The State Council held a press briefing on March 29 where officials from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and departments in charge of labor and social security, land, housing, and agriculture discussed urbanization issues. China has 655 cities, including 122 large ones that have populations of 1 million or more, and 118 with population of 500,000 to 1 million. The rest of the cities have populations under 500,000 and there are over 19,000 small towns. Officials would like to channel the newly-urbanized population into these small cities and towns, but comments by the director of the NDRC's planning office pointed out that the smaller places are not as adept at absorbing population, and they tend to use up a lot of land. The NDRC planning office director said there are still four big issues to be dealt with in urbanization. The "quality" of the urban population is not high. Out o...

Chinese officials have been struggling to bring order from "chaos" in the hog slaughtering business for many years. An article posted on several electronic bulletin boards describes the situation in Ye County, a major hog production area in central Henan Province. I haven't been able to discover the original source of the article, so it's veracity may be questionable--but there seem to be a lot of articles referring to chaos in hog slaughtering. The article says there has been a lot of attention to food safety in recent years as living standards have risen. Pork is one of the main food safety concerns. It's by far the most commonly-consumed meat and the government has been struggling to control several persisent problems: (1) selling pork from sick pigs, (2) pumping water (potentially contaminated) into pigs to increase their weight before slaughter, (3) other substances or feed additives like veterinary drugs and steroids in the pork. Regulations now try to conce...

A news report from the official Xinhua News Agency on March 14 urged local governments to crack down on the sale of fake and shoddy agricultural inputs. The article points to an unintended consequence of subsidies: if you hand out cash, crooks will be drawn like flies to try to grab it. The report cites "statistics" released by the consumer rights associations in Shandong and Anhui Province that showed huge increases in complaints about fake and shoddy seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides. The article assures us that the central government's efforts to bring order to agricultural input markets have been effective. It says big incidents of fake inputs are less frequent now. However, the article says the problems have become more diffused and the increase in complaints show that the problem has not gone away. The article says complaints from Shandong show that input dealers exaggerated the benefits of new seed varieties that hadn't been scientifically tested, and farmers g...

It's not easy to do business and make money. The dialogue below from a Baidu.com electronic bulletin board about an idea to make money selling apples shows the market economy in action. If there was money to be made, someone would have made it already. The posting is over 3 years old, but the grizzled veteran's advice is still true. The respondent is sarcastic, but in the end he takes time to give the inquirer some practical and specific suggestions. This posting illustrates (1) the vast number of people looking for ways to make a buck in China, (2) the hyper-competitiveness of the market, (3) and the efficiency of the market. There is no easy money to be made. Question posted December 4, 2006: I’m a third-year student at South China Normal University. I have a classmate who is in Hebei Province who told me apples there are very cheap—the price is 1 kuai per jin sold in bulk. Around our school (in Guangzhou) apples sell for 2.5 yuan per jin, so I’d like to buy some apples from...

China's grasslands have been seriously overgrazed, and there are serious problems with desertification, erosion, sand storms, and grass fires. The Ministry of Agriculture's 2009 pasture monitoring report--issued on March 22--shows that authorities are now paying a lot of attention to these problems. There have been marginal improvements but the situation is still "serious." The monitoring effort is a huge undertaking that involves the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, climate and weather organizations, regional research institutes, and local animal husbandry and extension stations in 22 "key" grassland provinces. The monitoring uses satellite remote sensing data, ground monitoring data from 400 counties, and pastoral family surveys. The following is my translation of the summary : The report says that 2009 was dry and hot, producing serious drought. Production conditions were not as good as the previous year. Natural pasture fresh grass output was 93...

A March 21 article from Zhejiang Online news site reports the results of investigative reporting on the source of the floating dead pigs reported on last week. The bottom line is that nobody actually knows exactly where they came from or why they died. They were from upstream and they probably died from the cold weather, but there's no epidemic. A few pigs that still had ear tags were traced to four farmers upstream. “We have already taken legal action against them,” was the reassuring pronouncement of an official. It seems that rotting pig carcasses in canals and rivers are a common fact of life in China. Googling “dead pig” in Chinese turns up a number of local news articles from Guangdong and Fujian Provinces about discoveries of dozens of dead pigs in waterways. In all the stories, local residents interviewed by the reporters seem unfazed by the dead pigs, as if it’s a normal occurrence. Officials always assure readers that there has been no disease epidemic. The Zhejiang repo...

Since March 9, hundreds of dead pigs have been found floating in the Qiantang River that flows through Hangzhou. City residents are concerned about whether the carcasses are contaminating their drinking water, and it also raises the question of where they came from. Initially, the event was reported locally and on overseas Chinese news sites, but the official Xinhua News agency affiliates reported the story on March 19 . According to a local news report, on March 13, a Mr. Liang called into a Hangzhou hotline and reported: “A garbage boat on the south bank of the Qiantang River is cleaning a lot of debris out of the river. People should be careful because a lot of dead poultry and pigs have been found in the river. I heard this kind of dead pig floated down from Tonglu, but don’t know whether the drinking water is affected.” Sanitation workers have been working furiously to pick the dead pigs and other garbage out of the river. So far, 570 pigs have been pulled out of the river. On Ma...

The March 18 "Corn Express" newletter from the China National Grain and Oils Information Center reports that farmers and enterprises have less corn on hand than usual. There was heavy snow over much of the northeast last weekend and transportation is difficult now. Processors raised purchase prices last week about 20-40 yuan per ton, but farmers are not selling much. In southern Jilin Province, the price of middle-grade corn was up to 1680 yuan/mt, equivalent to $6.25/bu. The price is higher than the support price of 1500 yuan and higher than the 1600 yuan threshold at which the government subsidizes corn shipments to southern China. The purchase price broke through 1900 yuan/mt in Shaanxi, Gansu and some other areas, over $7 per bushel. By comparison, the processor price in central Illinois reported by USDA/AMS was $3.62-3.73/bu on Wednesday. Chinese mills and processors are paying nearly twice as much for corn as their U.S. counterparts. The slow sales are partly due to the...

Greenhouses and chemical fertilizer have helped Chinese farmers to produce huge amounts of vegetables nearly year-round. The result was higher incomes for farmers and fresh vegetables at any time of year for Chinese consumers. Greenhouses cover the countryside in Shouguang A March 15 article from the overseas Chinese newspaper, World Journal , reveals the hidden costs of heavy long-term use of Nitrogen fertilizer. Reporters visited a village in Shouguang in Shandong Province, the center of greenhouse production in China. In the 1980s and early 1990s, officials introduced farmers to this new production strategy as a demonstration project. In some areas, the countryside has been turned white, covered with plastic greenhouses with few open fields. Groups come from all over the country to see how they do it. The reporters visited 48-year-old farmer Li Yufeng. She recalls how the farmers were amazed at the fat cucumbers produced with nitrogen fertilizer in 1989. She said, cucumbers no longe...

Read Steven Mufson's Washington Post article on water shortage and troubles with the South-to-North water diversion project, if you dare. The article doesn't mention the severe drought currently going on in southwestern China.

Last year Shaanxi Province exported organic red dates (also known as Chinese jujubes) for the first time. Seven shipments of red dates valued at $210,000 were shipped from Yulin city in the northern part of the province. The shipments were small, totaling just 48 metric tons, but they represent a symbolic breakthrough for this poor remote mountainous region on the border of Shaanxi and Shanxi Provinces. A giant date on a Shaanxi Province hilltop (displayed on an e-commerce site promoting dates) The story about the export of dates illustrates the government-business-farmer partnership strategy that China is using to bring products from remote backwaters to a supermarket near you. Apple juice is the most prominent example of this strategy--mostly it comes from the central part of Shaanxi--but jujubes, pears, oranges, kiwis, sausage casings, and other products are also taking this route. Farmers in the Yulin region have grown dates for many years, but the companies processing them were sm...

Parts of southern China are experiencing serious drought conditions. Most of Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guizhou have been suffering from drought for 5 months. Luocheng, in northern Guangxi, has been experiencing drought since last August. The drought is also affecting Sichuan and Chongqing. The rapeseed harvest may be seriously affected, and officials are worried about spring planting. Drought is affecting wheat and rapeseed crops in Gansu (in the northwest) as well. Over 18 million people and 11 million large livestock lack drinking water, said to be double the usual number for this season. The drought-affected area is said to include 92 million mu (6.1 million hectares). Official news reports describe the situation as "extremely serious" and "grim." Areas in red most seriously affected by drought as of March 10. Map from China National Weather Bureau. At the National Peoples Congress held in Beijing, Premier (and unoffical Minister of Sympathy) Wen Jiabao took time out ...

On March 5, Premier Wen Jiabao gave a government work report to the National Peoples Congress in which he repeated the emphasis on "coordinated urban-rural development" that was featured in the No. 1 Document. The video is here. China's leadership now appears to have recognized that the barriers that created a dual urban-rural economy need to be dismantled. Since the 1950s rural people have been barred from freely moving to cities by the household registration system and collective land ownership that tied them to their home villages. The rural system of equally dividing up and leasing out tiny plots of collectively owned land to village members is coming under pressure as more rural people find nonfarm employment and it becomes evident that small-scale subsistence agriculture is an outmoded institution. With its "coordinated urban-rural development" strategy, the Communist Party is relying on its instincts to plan and control the structural adjustments that are...

Recently, a "morality education forum" was held in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, where a farmer repented from his devious ways and pledged never to harm people by using pesticide and feed additives when he's not supposed to. The article, which appeared on Chinese news sites and electronic bulletin boards, was entitled "A Farmer's Confession." Bespectacled 36-year-old farmer Xu Qingyuan, from a village in Liaoning Province, is described as wearing plain clothes and having the simple, honest manner of a farmer. His confession was said to "shock" the audience. Mr. Xu confessed to dousing his cabbage with at least one spraying each week of toxic pesticides. He explains that the traditional way of planting cabbage is to plant it in late summer and harvest it late in the fall. Because of the cool temperatures, pesticides are normally not needed in this traditional mode. However, people now want to be able to consume cabbage year-round. Mr. Xu grew off-s...