(Below is the second in a series written from China by IATP President Jim Harkness. ed note)
As promised, today I report back on what local farmers said when we talked to them after our visit to Chennong Agriculture Company HQ in Yunnan Province. (To be on the safe side, even though I'm sure it wouldn't be an issue, I have omitted farmers' names.)
The area around Kunming, including Chenggong, has a lot of intensive vegetable cultivation. This probably both contributed to and was then bolstered further by the growth of Chennong Company, and the company is now a leading source of seedlings for local farmers whether they sell the produce to the company or not. This area has a mild winter, but temperatures do dip below freezing at night, and winter is also fairly dry. Hoop houses---simple, temporary greenhouses made by stretching clear plastic sheeting over a bamboo frame---permit cultivation year round, with up to six harvests over 12 months.
After our visit to the Chennong facilities was complete (and we had sampled the local cuisine) we decided to stick around and talk to some farmers. A young day laborer volunteered to be our guide. She was not from the area, but had lived there for some time doing construction, and had gotten to know many local farmers.
She was a good example of the mixed blessings of development in China. I noticed she had a shiny new mobile phone, which she modestly said had only cost a few hundred RMB. She bought it when she and her husband were getting regular work at a good rate, up to 20 RMB a day. But his foot was run over by a truck on the work site and the small cash payment the boss gave them couldn’t cover his hospital bill, which was over 10,000 RMB. So he took their baby and went back to their hometown in the poor, northeast corner of the province, to recuperate at his parents’ home. Shortly after he left, work at the site was suspended, so she was left with no income and nothing to do, and therefore happy to show us around. (We insisted on paying her for her trouble when we left, but she put up a big fight, saying we were friends and she didn’t want us to think she was doing it to get paid.)
We first met these men preparing to load a big basketload of spinach onto a tractor to take to market. They told us they grow a dozen or more varieties of vegetables for sale in local markets. They’re hoping to get 1 RMB per kilo for this spinach.
Inside their hoop house, the women of the family picked spinach and carried it out to the road on their backs in wicker baskets.
They buy their seedlings from Chennong, and speak highly of the 100 percent survival rates and high productivity. When they grew their vegetables from seeds, farmers could never have harvested five or six crops a year as they can with Chennong’s seedlings. They sometimes sell to the company as well, but they aren’t enthusiastic about agribusiness. They-----in fact all the farmers we spoke to----laughed at the idea of a floor price or a contract. “Even if you have a contract that specifies a price, it doesn’t say how much they have to buy, or that they have to buy anything at all.” When prices are low, Chennong’s buyers pick only the very highest quality produce---often a tiny proportion of the crop. So even if they offer a floor price for what they buy, the farmers are still stuck with the bulk of their crop.
There were other complaints. Chennong, they told us, uses its influence with local government to get preferential access to valuable land. (As another farmer put it, “They see a piece of land they like, and then they go and find the officials, who get it for them.”) And their processing facilities have polluted local waterways. “We used to be able to catch shrimp and fish in the ditches, but there’s nothing left alive now.”
Down another row of hoop houses a husband-wife team, friends of our guide, were picking a different green vegetable (I think it’s sometimes called Shanghai bok choy in English). They said prices vary tremendously during the year, from as low as 5 fen (100 fen = 1 RMB) to as high as one RMB per kg. They raised six hoop houses worth of vegetables in 2007 that they didn’t even bother to pick because the price was so low.
Like so many farmers the world over, their biggest problem is low prices combined with growing costs. In a good year, they can sell 10,000 RMB worth of veggies, but inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides and plastic sheeting for their hoop houses add up to 6-7000 RMB. The farmers complained that inputs now cost ten times what they did 20 years ago, a rise not matched by increases in food prices. They also have to pay a variety of taxes and fees. The national Agricultural Tax was officially scrapped with great fanfare several years ago in order to help reduce the economic burden of farmers, but a variety of fees are either still being levied or have been added at the local level.
An added concern in Chenggong is organized crime. Local gangsters started charging the truck drivers who delivered vegetables from field to market 50 to 100 RMB per load, so most have stopped coming. When farmers load up their little tractors and take their own produce to market, they are often waylaid on the way and forced to sell their load to gangsters at below the market price.
