(Ed. note. IATP's President, Jim Harkness, is blogging from China for the next two weeks as he meets with experts on China's food and farm system)
Despite all the concerns about air pollution affecting athletes at next year’s Olympics, Beijing’s skies are brilliant blue this week. Friends tell me I was fortunate to miss a nasty spell of smog that ended the day before I arrived.
This afternoon I met with Mr. Li Changping. Li became a hero to China’s farmers in 2000 when he wrote a letter to then-Premier Zhu Rongji exposing the bitter hardships facing the rural Chinese. A Communist Party member who had worked for 17 years in rural townships in Central China, Li detailed the desperation of farmers in his township, 80 percent of whom were losing money and 85 percent of whom were in debt, and railed against corrupt local officials. Amazingly, his letter actually reached the Premier, who demanded that the provincial government carry out an investigation. But in a sign of the limited reach of the central government in contemporary China, nothing came of the probe and once it was over, Li himself was “investigated” by the local government and fired. (He now works as a rural development consultant.) Nevertheless, the affair brought to light the severity of the economic and social crisis in rural China, and Li was named “Man of the Year” by one of China’s leading newspapers.
I wanted Li’s perspective on rural co-operatives as a means for farmers to reduce risk and get a better deal in the market. Last week I visited farms in southwestern Wisconsin that are members of America’s largest organic dairy co-operative with Professor Zhou Li, a Chinese researcher who’s currently in residence at IATP. Afterwards, Zhou said that co-ops based solely on production and marketing have been tried in recent years in China, but almost all collapsed as soon as there was a downturn in the price of their products. But was this because of some objective condition in China, some legal or economic obstacle to this form of organization, or because of the way the co-ops were organized or managed? It wasn’t clear from my discussion with Zhou. Li Changping is developing a credit cooperative and thinks this is a more viable approach to helping Chinese farmers, whose size and lack of collateral for loans (since they don’t own their land) effectively shuts them out of the official banking system.
We also discussed lots of other things: political and economic theory in contemporary China, cooperatives vs collective agriculture, the problems of the government-supported corporate agriculture model (“Company Plus Farmer’), and the different approaches to rural cooperation pursued in Taiwan and Japan. I’m still not clear on what the key obstacles are here and now, but it was a great start!
