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...