Suchergebnisse

Since the early 1990s, the Chinese government has been promoting organic agriculture as an alternative to the "conventional" agriculture practised in the Chinese countryside. The latter uses increasingly large amounts of chemical fertilisers and pesticides and, as a result, threatens the environmental sustainability of the rural economy. Though absolute numbers of organic farmers remain small, there has been a dramatic increase in their rate of growth since 1995, aided and abetted by the work of the Chinese Organic Food Development Centre (OFDC) in Nanjing established in that year. In 2002, the OFDC gained full international accreditation and recognition, allowing Chinese organic products certified by it to be sold in lucrative markets throughout the world. At the same time, there is a vigorous debate going on inside China regarding changes in property rights over land, with many scholars advocating full privatisation. This paper, through case study research, contributes to this debate in the context of the extension of organic farming in China. It examines current land rights arrangements in nine organic villages in different parts of the Chinese countryside to investigate whether they are conducive to organic agriculture expansion or hostile to it. On the basis of this research, it argues that the extant "partially privatised common property regime" associated with the Household Responsibility System, when combined with appropriate collective arrangements amongst farmers, can be a satisfactory basis for the adoption of organic agriculture, particularly amongst China's poorest farmers. As a result, it concludes that the Chinese government should encourage those collective arrangements rather than risk new forms of instability as well as environmental unsustainability through wholesale land privatisation. (J Contemp China/DÜI)

This article discusses one of the Chinese Government's initiatives for developing environmentally friendly economic activity in the Chinese countryside since the reforms, that of Chinese Ecological Agriculture (CEA). It draws on the author's research findings from seven villages and, to a lesser extent, four countries that have adopted CEA in different parts of the Chinese countryside in recent years. It concludes that while CEA may indeed provide considerable economic and environmental benefits, there are a number of important factors constraining its adoption and consequent extension throughout rural China, the most important being small-scale family arming reintroduced with the Household Responsibility system in the early 1980s, It argues that if CEA is to flourish, a more collectivised agriculture, as already practised in Village Conglomerates in some of the more affluent parts of the Chinese contryside, should be encouraged. (J Contemp China/DÜI)