Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

An ambitious rural revitalization initiative was one of 8 priorities set for Chinese officials at the 2018 "economic work conference" held in Beijing December 18-20. The strategy was one of the directives issued in Xi Jinping's October speech to the 19th communist party congress where he proclaimed that agricultural and rural problems are foundational issues that must receive the utmost attention from communist party leaders. Over the past decade, China's statisticians consistently reported numbers showing that the gap between countryside and city was improving, but now the official Xinhua news service reports a dismal situation to explain why rural revitalization is so critical: development in the countryside still lags far behind cities, inadequate development in the countryside is a glaring weakness, and the rural-urban imbalance is the most prominent imbalance in China's development. The rural strategy was described only briefly in Xi's speech...

Initial results of China's 2016 agricultural census confirm that the country's farming sector remains shrouded in a statistical fog where numbers reveal only gray indistinct shapes whose details cannot be discerned with any precision. The skimpy initial release of statistics reveals nothing about what is produced, but they suggest China still has lots of people in the countryside squatting on plots of land they are not allowed to sell. Livestock and aquaculture farming--where land is less of a constraint--have proceeded much faster in commercialization and specialization than crop production. Scaled-up farms are increasing in number, but they have a long way to go to transform farming in China. Last week, the National Bureau of Statistics released a series of five communiques , a graphical summary of changes  over the last 10 years and two essays by communist party go-to academics which amount to cheerleading about how much life in the countryside has improved because of the...

Chinese officials and scholars have recently been discussing rural policy for the "new era" proclaimed in Xi Jinping's October speech to the 19th communist party congress. Agriculture faces a number of conflicts in fulfilling Comrade Xi's various pledges to be an open economy, maintain secure control over the food supply, be a leader in environmental governance, and bring all segments of society into relatively well-off status by 2020. With shrinking land and water resources, rising rural labor costs, the need to maintain food security, and a new pledge to produce high quality products,   Ke Bingsheng, president of China Agricultural University and an agricultural economist, commented  that it would take a "miracle" for China to produce enough food for its growing consumption. Since communists are atheists, they have to put their faith in technology and government planning, so Professor Ke proclaims "modern agriculture" is the needed "miracl...

A donkey development project illustrates one of the Chinese communist party's strategies for rural poverty alleviation. Inspection and quarantine bureaus--responsible for inspecting imports and exports--have been instructed to take on side projects to help poor farmers as a political task. Communist party organizations are using their connections to mobilize resources in order to accomplish a task that would be conducted by NGOs or specialized aid agencies in most countries. According to the Yunnan Province inspection and quarantine bureau , the unit's communist party organization led a program to bring economic development to Xinle Village, a small community of 1546 people with an average of just 0.61 mu (one-tenth of an acre) of land per person. The effort was described as the bureau's "political responsibility for poverty alleviation." The inspection and quarantine bureau (known as "CIQ") arrived to help in 2015. A cooperative designed to produce ...

China produced 617.9 million metric tons of grain in 2017, according to a communique issued by the country's National Bureau of Statistics yesterday. An accompanying analysis noted that this was China's second-largest grain crop ever and explained that production growth of 0.3 percent reflected a nationwide structural adjustment campaign ordered by the communist party this year to shift crop area from corn--which has "relatively large inventories"--to minor grains and bean crops, and to expand production of other nongrain crops like peanuts and medicinal herbs. Weather was favorable--a rapid increase in temperatures came after spring planting, rainfall and sunshine were adequate, and weather remained warm near the harvest--and government officials followed orders from the communist party leadership to avert losses from floods. Overall, grain production was up 1.5 mmt, which reflects a 3.6-mmt decline in corn output offset by minor gains in rice, wheat, minor grain...