Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

A journalist's investigation of organic food products reveals the confusion and cheating that undermine confidence in "organic" foods that are now commonly on offer in Chinese supermarkets. The journalist visited supermarkets, interviewed farmers, traders and regulators in Shandong and Guangxi and found that consumers have only a vague idea of what "organic" means, supermarket labels play fast and loose with "organic" labels, and fraud is common. When the journalist asked twenty shoppers in a supermarket what "organic food" means, he received a variety of answers: "the package is marked organic," "the price is higher," "healthy, nutritious, without contamination." The journalist suggests that consumers' sketchy understanding of what organic means makes it hard to verify that foods really are organic. Sign on shelf says "organic vegetables" but no certification label on package. Some foods...

Organic food from China is a controversial issue. Last year one of the biggest organic certifiers pulled out of China when it was determined that its use of personnel from the Organic Food Development Center (OFDC) to certify government-owned companies constituted a conflict of interest. In 2008, a TV news segment questioned Whole Foods supermarkets' sale of organics sourced from China, and Whole Foods responded by cutting most of its China-sourced organics and put an explanation on its web site which claims that it's possible to produce organic food in China. Meanwhile, the popularity of organic food in China is growing, but Chinese organics are being undermined by the same problem with fakes experienced by every other industry in the country. China now has a growing segment of consumers willing to pay premium prices for safe, healthy, ecologically-friendly foods, but many hesitate to buy "organic" food because they don't have confidence in the certification. ...

Motivated by distrust of the food system, some Chinese city residents are renting garden plots in the countryside to grow their own vegetables or hiring farmers to grow them. The International Herald Tribune reported on the "Little Donkey City Peoples' Garden" in a village outside Beijing's 6th ring road. The garden is dotted with plots, each with a name, rented out to city people where they can raise their own vegetables. Ms. Yi, a retired worker, comes to tend her garden twice a week. She pays 1200 yuan to rent a 30-square-meter plot. By my calculation that's 1/22 of a mu and works out to rent of 25,000 yuan per mu. For comparison purposes, farmland in China typically rents for 300-to-1000 yuan per mu, so this is good money for the peasants. During the 1970s, like many young city people, Ms. Yi was "sent down to the countryside" to "learn from the peasants." Now she's voluntarily going down to the countryside to grow her own food. She...

A November 1 Washington Post article describes young professionals in Shanghai who are trying to become organic farmers. Interesting piece with nice photos. The Washington Post article describes "bottom-up" organic farmers in the western mold of educated people who want to get back to the land. The organic "movement" in China is mostly a quite different "top-down" mode--government agencies and companies see a market and a way to improve food safety and then rent land from farmers or organize a bunch of farmers into a "production base" to grow organic food. In the industrialized "top-down" approach used in China the farmers have little concept of what organic agriculture really is. Chongming Island, where the farmers are operating their farms, is an interesting place. It used to be carved up into state-owned farms and a lot of Shanghai residents were "sent down" there during the cultural revolution. Now it has become a big eco-...