Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

A crackdown on vacation homes disguised as greenhouses reveals China's clashing priorities: leaders say they want farm-related tourism to pump money into the countryside, but most of the land can only be used to grow crops that pay farmers a pittance.  Last week China's Agriculture and Natural Resources ministries jointly published a list of cases where rural villas and vacation homes were disguised as farming structures . These have been demolished and reclaimed as farmland since authorities launched a campaign against such projects 4 years ago (see this blog's September 2018 post on greenhouse villas ). The projects skirt strict zoning of rural land for agriculture by building hotels, teahouses and villas inside giant greenhouses or by disguising vacation cabins as sheds for field laborers. With scarce land and robust demand for bucolic vacations and getaways in the countryside, the projects are an easy way for rural villages to earn money. Vacation cabins illegally bui...

Chinese cotton prices have been in a downward spiral since May. In early July, the reported by the National Bureau of Statistics was down 17 percent from its March peak. Last Wednesday the September cotton contract on the Zhengzhou commodity exchange fell 7 percent and the yarn futures price fell 4 percent. A Ministry of Agriculture analysis last month pointed out that Chinese cotton prices are now at an unusually low level below the cost of cotton imported from the world market at a 1-percent "sliding scale" tariff. This summer's price collapse reverses last year's steep gains when Chinese factories roared to life as the world emerged from lockdown, reviving textile orders. Analysts say  Chinese textile orders evaporated in recent months as extended covid lockdowns in China closed many retail outlets in 2022. The demand hit was magnified as China's latest virus lockdowns came during the usual seasonal lull in demand. Companies are slowing their cotton purchases ...

The Economist magazine provoked a furious reaction from China's State propagandists when it tweeted last week that the world's pigs consume more grain than all the people in China. Chinese State media conflated the adjacency of pigs and Chinese people in the same sentence to claim the Tweet was racist. Nearly everyone commenting on Twitter echoed the Chinese accusations of racism, thus successfully diverting attention from the inconvenient truth that China's hungry pigs (and chickens) are in fact contributing to tight grain supplies.  On June 23, 2022  The Economist ran a brief story, " Most of the world's grain is not eaten by humans ," subtitled "Nearly half of all grain is either burned as fuel or eaten by animals" to provide some perspective on this year's tight grain supplies and high food prices.  China's stridently nationalist Global Times was outraged over The Economist's tweet that "In 2019 pigs ate 432m tonnes of grain,...