(Ed. note: IATP's President, Jim Harkness, is blogging from China as he meets with experts on China's food and farm system)
The meeting I blogged about on Saturday on the Guoren food co-op had left me pretty confused, so I was glad when professor He invited me to visit their store and give some feedback. Why had they chosen to link consumer and producer co-ops? How could they function as a delivery service and have two stores with 79 members spread all over Beijing - an enormous city of 18 million?
It took over an hour by cab to get from my friend Elizabeth’s apartment in the center of town up to Tiantong Yuan, a massive residential district in the far north. Traffic in Beijing somehow manages to get worse despite already being almost at a standstill during rush hour. Soon the cars will travel only in reverse…
Tiantong Yuan consists of over 100 30-story apartment blocks, packed into a few square kilometers of northern Beijing. Over 300,000 people live there, a population of about the size of St. Paul, MN. (OK, some of us think of that as a major city!)
As you can see from the picture, all that was planned and built were apartment blocks, with some small open spaces in between. There is no commercial area. As a result, entrepreneurial residents have turned first-floor apartments into little bodegas to provide for basic needs. This is a huge, middle class “food desert” due to bad urban planning, rather than long-term urban decay.
The address of the co-op store was one of those first floor apartments. Professor He was held up in traffic, so Zhang Chao, the marketing manager of the co-op, showed us around. He explained that the co-op does want to build a base in a specific community, instead of having its members spread all over the city. The immediate neighborhood has over 60,000 residents, all of whom face the same lack of access to fresh food. So the strategy started to make more sense to me, until I saw the actual items for sale. The co-op has its own little bodega, with liquor and toilet paper and instant noodles. And then they have their co-op members’ store, a single room with shelves of dry goods on two walls. But there’s no fresh food! The store sells dry noodles and various organic grains (millet, rice, wheat flour), but most products are higher-priced cooking ingredients or medicinal products.
This is where the problem of the producer/consumer link comes in. Guoren needs to sell what its producer members grow, and what wasn’t clear in Saturday's meeting was that none of the producers are near Beijing. They are all farming co-ops around China that have been set up in recent years as part of an effort to revive co-operative farming on a non-coerced basis. So the basic idea of setting up a co-op to meet the food needs of a community has gotten lost in the mix, and instead of cabbage and carrots they’re selling dried fungus and diced deer penis.
The good news is that they were aware of this problem, in part because of the meeting last Saturday. Professor He arrived and explained that they now plan to separate the functions of the co-op. So Zhang Chao will run a domestic fair trade company to market goods from the co-ops in Beijing, and separately the consumers’ co-op will build a membership based on selling food that its members want to buy. The idea behind the fair trade company is interesting. There is so little trust of the different labeling systems for healthy or organic food in China that professor He thinks it may be possible to build a different type of brand around farming co-ops. She wants consumers to think of food that comes from co-ops as trustworthy, fair and healthy. In this way, the dozens of new co-ops will have a market advantage, and through the fair trade company it will be possible to guarantee and gradually raise environmental standards on the farms.
It’s important to note that for now, these organic food co-ops are as small and tangential in relation to mainstream organic in China as organic agriculture in the U.S. was in relation to conventional agriculture 10 years ago. A staggering 8.6 million hectares of land is under organic cultivation in China (as opposed to 2.2 million in the US), and although much is consumed domestically, a large proportion also goes to foreign markets. There are serious doubts about the quality and safety of the food being exported under the organic label because of the weakness of the certification system here. Produce is almost entirely bound for nearby markets in Japan and Korea, but more durable commodity crops such as soy go to the U.S. (You’ve probably had some if you’ve bought Silk, a popular brand of soy milk.)
The people and places I’m visiting on this trip are important because they represent the beginning of a domestic backlash against industrial export agriculture in China. I think we need to do all we can to help them, for our sake as well as theirs.
