Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

China's Heilongjiang Province announced a new pilot subsidy for farmers who rotate corn and soybeans . The subsidy is 150 yuan per mu (about $136 per acre). Eligible farms must have planted corn in 2015 and soybeans in 2016. The subsidy will be paid only to new-type farms that include large scale farms, family farms, and farmer cooperatives. The subsidy appears to be part of two Chinese initiatives. First is the overhaul of grain subsidies which combines three separate subsidies into a single payment and makes payments to both small-scale landholders and new-style farms that rent in land. Second is a structural adjustment initiative which hopes to address the surplus of corn and deficit of soybeans by inducing farmers to shift land from corn to soybeans. A related initiative seeks to break the continuous mono-cropping of corn that has become predominant in northeastern China and degrades soil fertility. The document announcing the subsidy offers no concrete details about how au...

Years of excessive chemical fertilizer use have reduced the productivity of rice paddies in many parts of Hubei Province, according to a news report from China's official broadcasting service . Mr. Song, a Hubei rice producer who has contracted 1650 mu (272 acres) of land, says yields have been declining and he now plans to leave a lot of his land fallow or plant other crops on his rented fields. Describing a kind of treadmill process, he says his chemical fertilizer application has doubled but yields are about the same as a decade ago. According to the article, this phenomenon of declining yields and land left idle is common all over Hubei Province, one of China's leading rice-producing areas. An agricultural technician explained that the lower yields are due to the compaction of the soil. After many years of applying chemical fertilizer, a 20-cm. layer of fertilizer has built up. Oxygen cannot penetrate below the surface. The soil is difficult to plow, whether using water...

Chinese officialdom is finally acknowledging soil contamination problems.  China's first soil contamination survey was released this week , revealing that 16 percent of all land monitored over eight years was polluted above accepted tolerances. The survey found that 19 percent of farmland of polluted. Results of China's 2005-13 soil contamination survey: Proportion of soil survey points with contamination above maximum tolerance 16.1% Of which:   Above tolerance limit but less than double 11.2%   Double-to-triple the tolerance 2.3%   Three-to-four times the tolerance 1.5%   Five times the tolerance 1.1% Source: Communique on soil contamination survey. The new-found environmental consciousness is apparently spurred by widespread concern about "cadmium rice" contamination that was publicized in 2013. In December, agricultural officials began to talk about pollution and environmental problems that make China's current level of produ...

Liu Xiangji, a rice mill operator in Hunan Province's You County, claims he hasn't been able to sleep at night since cadmium was detected in his mill's rice. "What is cadmium? I really don't know." Liu is perplexed because his mill removes husks, polishes the rice and bags it; nothing is added to the rice in the process. So he doesn't understand how rice could have become contaminated. In contrast to many of China's other food safety incidents, there is no "black-hearted" behavior or clear culprits intentionally adding poisons in the "cadmium rice" incident. Instead, it stems from widespread pollution of the rice-growing environment due to both unchecked industrialization and abuse of agricultural chemicals by farmers. The cadmium contamination is blamed largely on waste from mining and metal-smelting industries that is carried to fields by irrigation water, deposited in the soil and then absorbed by crops. Polluting industries ...