Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

On January 26-28, the Ministry of Agriculture called in representatives of its elite "dragon head" enterprises (also known as "leading" or "flagship" enterprises) to instruct them on the communist party's new direction for businesses. The vice-minister of agriculture, Chen Xiaohua, outlined China's new strategy for agricultural companies at a "training class" for representatives of national-level agricultural "dragon head" enterprises. At the training, the company representatives were devoted to "serious study" of the central communist party's work meetings on the economy, rural affairs, and agriculture. The meeting is an example of how the party/government instructs large businesses who get certain benefits from the government on how to carry out the party/government's strategy. If you're watching what's happening or doing business in China, you should be aware of the behind-the-scenes string-pulling t...

China still has a system of massive state farms, mostly in desolate border regions like Heilongjiang, Xinjiang, and Yunnan, and on the outskirts of cities. In Chinese, they are known as "reclamation" farms (nong ken) since many are established in desolate areas or on reclaimed marsh, jungle or mountain land. These are holdovers from the central planning period that have now morphed into big agribusiness enterprises. Since they have large scale and access to government resources, they are on the vanguard of many trends. The state farm system held a conference in Beijing this week to publicize its traceability system that involves 50 state farm enterprises and 6 local enterprises in 23 provinces. According to Farmer's Daily , it is an early implementation of the objective of bringing into play a “record-keeping in production, product-tracing in distribution, information retrievability, accountability” system. During November 7-14, the Ministry of Agriculture’s state farm bu...

We were wowed by the Olympic ceremonies. This amazing display demonstrated how China can concentrate resources on a problem it wants to solve regardless of the cost. Food safety was one of the big concerns in preparations for the games. Organizers worried that sick athletes or failed doping tests due to hormone-laced meat would give China bad publicity. So since 2005 there has been a massive effort to develop an elaborate system of production bases for vegetables, milk, poultry, etc., including secret pig farms where the hogs eat like kings, have to swear off drugs and get to roam around in exercise yards in accord with European animal welfare requirements. Last year I visited the control room in northwest Beijing to see the city's food safety monitoring system. Like the opening ceremonies it was an awe-inspiring martialing of technology and "Big Brother"-type control. The wall was covered by a bank of video and computer screens. There is a massive database that allegedly...