Forrest
I think the biggest misconception when it comes to inequality in China is that for most people, they think that the urban-rural inequality is the biggest inequality. That is simply wrong. Because China is so regionally diverse. I think the biggest inequality is regional inequality.
Matthew
This is another bonus of episode of Feeding 1 in 6, China and the future of food, presented by TABLE, I’m Matthew Kessler.
Forrest
Traditionally people have the image that urban China is all up here and rural China is all down here. They're clearly two segregated societies. The reality is a villager in Huanghzhou is way better economically socially than some urban folks in Guangzhou or Xi’an. So when you look at urban rural inequality, it doesn't really explain that.
Matthew
This is Forrest Zhang is a professor of sociology at Singapore Management University who has spent the last few decades tracking China’s agrarian transition.
Forrest
I'm originally from China. I did my PhD in the US and have been working in Singapore for 20 years. My research focuses on agrarian development in rural China. But also social stratification and rural-urban relationship, obviously.
Matthew
Understanding regional inequality in China matters in a few ways. First, it busts the myth that China’s countryside is uniformly poor. And second, it exposes the flaws in how we typically measure development.
Forrest
Another thing to remember is that the easiest way to reduce the urban-rural inequality gap or income gap is to move the rural poor to the cities. You know, the poorest people from countryside migrate to cities, then all of a sudden the average income of the countryside rises and the average income of the urban areas declines and the gap shortens, right? And that's exactly what happened in a lot of developing countries. The farmers have been dispossessed of their land, they have no way to live in the countryside, so they move into the urban slums. So the poorest people from the countryside are moved to the cities. So that statistically helps you to reduce the urban rural income gap, but doesn't improve anyone's life.
Matthew
But when you look at China, the trajectory differs in some important ways.
Forrest
In China's case, because rural folks have their land entitlement - they can be poor, but they can still stay in the countryside and survive. They may not live very comfortably, but at least nobody's kicking them out, right? Well, sometimes they are kicked out, but you know, by and large, they can stay in the countryside.
So I think the biggest misconception is just to think that rural China is so worse off and urban China is so better off. And generally, actually, a lot of people living in the countryside very comfortably and very happily because they have their community, they have nice environment, they have self supplied food and a lot of things. So that's a very important thing to keep in mind when we think of rural China.
Matthew
That's exactly what we’re doing a deep dive into today: Rural China.
This is a follow up to our last episode, where we spoke with the authors of SystemIQ's paper China's Food Future. They laid out one possible scenario for how the country might feed itself, and what that might mean for the world . Today, we go more granular, and look at different food futures in China, and some key vulnerabilities facing China's countryside.
Forrest Zhang is a fantastic person to help us understand this. One of the questions he's been tracking over the last few decades is how capitalism has fundamentally reshaped agriculture in China?
And I wonder what made you originally interested in - you have degrees in urban geography and sociology- how did those lenses help you answer the questions you were curious to ask about the world?
Forrest
Yeah, that's a very interesting question that I oftentimes ask myself. I actually grew up in the cities. I never had experiences living in the countryside. and I didn't really study anything related with the countryside in college. I started to become interested in agricultural, rural China when I was doing my PhD research because back then a major topic in sociology is about the post socialist transition in China, right? How China is moving away from a socialist economy toward something unknown at that point. It's debated. and one major debate is about the so-called market transition.
I realized that in that debate one major area has been overlooked which is agriculture, right?. So it became a very obvious question, a theoretically important question, that if China is transitioning from socialism toward capitalism, what happens to its agriculture?
Matthew
So let’s get into it how has capitalism reshaped Chinese agriculture and the countryside?
Forrest
Okay, so I think the most obvious change is the rise of a new kind of producer, right? In the Chinese context these are called new agricultural operators. They are agribusiness, they're basically companies and then they are large scale household farmers. These farmers are still family based but their scale of operation is way bigger than the traditional household farming and then there are cooperatives. Very few of them are authentic cooperatives. Most of them are really agribusiness in disguise, but they're called cooperatives. So a whole bunch of these new agricultural operators, if you look at them, they're really basically for profit capitalist enterprises. They're based on a profit making model and if they don't make profit they exit.
Matthew
Incentivizing farmers to make more profit will obviously lead to improved yields, which is part of the effort achieve production targets and reach national food security goals. But it has this other interesting effect, which shows up in a particular way, because of land ownership works in China.
Forrest
So they hire labor, they often need to in all cases they have to rent land because all rural land in China is collectively owned and is then allocated to each household based on contract. So for anyone who wants to scale up beyond the scale of allocated household land, you have to rent land from others. And often time if you really want to go big scale it's impossible just to go door to door to rent from your neighbours. You have to go through the village collective as an intermediary who helps you to consolidate land and then you rent from the village collective. So as as you can imagine, this process is is fraught with tension, right?
Some small farmers do not want to give up their land, even they may receive a rent. They want to continue with their own family farming. So there are all kinds of conflicts, tensions. Sometimes heavy handed measures are used by the village collective to push small farmers out of farming to consolidate their land. Sometimes a lot of small farmers are willing to give up their land to receive a rent, which then free up their labor, they can go to do wage work. So through this process, through the land consolidation, a lot of large-scale operators have entered into Chinese agriculture. And this is an entirely new thing that really started in the early 2000s. And since then they have been steadily growing.
Matthew
Can we just spend a minute texturing what it means to shift from a socialist to a capitalist agrarian transition? How does agriculture look differently? How is food produced differently?
Forrest
So overall the number of small family farmers have been declining rapidly. Based on our research, in the first two decades of the 21st century, the total population of agricultural labor force - most of them are obviously small family farmers have declined by 200 million. So that's nearly sixty percent decline over a twenty year period of time. So it's a very rapid decline. So however, as I said, they still remain numerically the majority of agricultural producers in China.
Matthew
It’s worth repeating that. 200 million smallholders exited farming in 20 years. This helps set up the scale and pace of change that the countryside is experiencing.
Forrest
But even for these small family farmers, their methods of production has also changed, right? So traditionally, let's say 1980s, after the decollectivization reform, because of the limited scale and also limited input of agrochemicals, limited access to farm machineries, and also you know, the the abundance of family labor, i the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, most of the small family farmers they are continuing with a a traditional type of farming. What nowadays we may even call that agroecology, right? They do not use a lot of external input. They have a multi cropping system, whereas, you know, pick backyard pig farming, some chickens which provide a manure which can be used as fertilizer for the farm field and then a lot of the farm produce, especially the waste can be used to feed the animal. and it's very labor intensive. But now that has pretty much I wouldn't say disappeared, but has become very rare.
Matthew
So what exactly did the remaining smallholders transform into?
Forrest
They operate it basically as a for-profit small family business, right? They have their own allocated land which they get as an entitlement, it's free. But they heavily dependent on purchased agrochemical inputs, which are expensive. fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and all these chemical inputs. and they try to minimize their labor input in agriculture because family labor nowadays have very high opportunity costs. Especially for you know anyone below 50s. Then you can easily find the wage job either through migration, but now increasingly in the county seat or nearby city, right?
Matthew
This is a pathway out of poverty that is pretty unique to China. The broader economic boom created an abundance of off-farm jobs. This changed the math for many rural families.
Forrest
Non-farm work, the wage income from non-farm work becomes the opportunity cost. So for anyone who is engaging in agricultural production, they have to do the calculation whether my income from farming matches the potential wage income that I can get on a non-farm job.
And of course their individual characteristics. You know, for example, you may have children or elderly at home, you have to stay at home to take care of them, or for whatever reason you like living in the countryside. There are all kinds of the other social and economic reasons. But by and large, most people are prioritizing higher incomes and that often means move to non farm wage employment.
So for a family farmer in rural China nowadays, their priority is wage income. And agriculture really does not provide higher wage income. So what they try to do is to replace labor with industrial inputs, including all the agrochemicals, but also including the machinery services. They don't own machine because machines are too expensive and their scale are too small. So there are plenty of specialized agricultural machinery operators they can hire the pay a fee and the operators can basically use the machine to replace the labor to do most of the farm work.
Matthew
This helps set the scene. Agricultural production has transformed in the last few decades. Agribusinesses have entered the picture. Smallholders have been declining rapidly, and the remaining ones are basically making a calculation. Will the costs of agrochemical inputs and rented machinery be compensated from the profits they receive from higher yields?
But within this new model, there are distinct trajectories awaiting these smallholders. We’re going to explore where they are going, but we have to first pay attention to the government’s vision of the countryside. Because the Chinese Communist’s party has a "Rural Revitalization" policy, and it plays a central role in shaping the future.
The five goals of the policy are: industrial prosperity, ecological sustainability, cultural preservation, effective governance, and improved living standards. Forrest tells us what this looks like in practice, and what might be its blind spots.
Forrest (20:14.802)
Rural revitalization has been a focal point for the past few years for the entire government from top down. Based on my observation is that the rural revitalization policy, as we can tell from the five goals it outlines, it focuses a lot really on economic development.
So the central focus is how to revitalize the rural economy. I guess there are two sides of it. On the one hand, there are really new opportunities for the rural economy to develop. I think one thing that rural China is really something very unique compared to the countryside of a lot of other countries. I think at least a couple of things stand out. First is the high population density, right? This is probably common in Asian countries, in Southeast Asia, in South Asia, Very high population density. so which means that they're already a huge population that can do all kinds of production and there's a thriving market.
So that's the first thing. And the second thing is that the rural economy in China is very diverse. It's not just agricultural. Compared to a lot of developing countries, for example, in the densely populated Asia, rural China is very diverse, highly industrialized. Of course not every part of rural China, but you know, in the coastal areas, even in North China. A lot of the small industrial enterprises operating in the countryside. This is a legacy of obviously from the collective era and then from the township and village development township and village enterprises in the nineteen eighties and nineties. And this is a development experiences that most other developing countries really don't have. So that's the second thing.
And the third thing is that the infrastructure in rural China is just way better than most rural areas across the world, I would say. Because in the past two decades, probably more than two decades, ever since Hu Jinta and Wenjabao's administration, the built a new socialist countryside campaign, already started to put a lot of investment into the countryside to improve the infrastructure, road,and drinking water, communication, housing, and waste disposal - every aspect. And of course under the current administration, under rural revitalization policy, again a lot of fiscal resources have been devoted to improving, upgrading the infrastructure in the countryside.
So when you put all these three together, which means that a lot of rural areas in China is not really the countryside or the rural areas we have in mind, right? It's really like suburbs or small towns.
Matthew
Forrest says this policy has been mostly successful for wider society. Urban residents are visiting these areas for leisure and some are even choosing to live there where they can commute or work remotely. To make this possible, China now has near-universal 5G coverage.
Forrest calls this trend counter-urbanization: the urban economy expanding into the countryside, revitalizing rural areas without relying on farming at all. This part of the policy has genuinely worked. But it's a story about places that already had something to build on.
Forrest
What I'm critical of the rural revitalization policy is that because it's putting too much focus on economic growth, so it doesn't match very well with some rural areas where there is really not much potential for economic growth. In those rural areas, as you may know, that for example, inland, or Western China, the villages that have gone through a depopulation process.
A lot of young people have moved out to cities. They're not coming back. So the remaining villagers in those villages are mostly elderly, right? And they're doing small scale agriculture because their natural conditions are not conducive for large-scale, very productive agriculture.
Matthew
This is part of what Forrest meant by China has wide regional inequality. The country and countryside are so diverse that it’s hard for a single sweeping policy to address everyone’s specific needs.
Forrest
So that kind of village is oftentime neglected or at least overlooked in the rural revitalization campaign. But for a lot of rural folks, that's their home and that's there's is they they basically stay there until you know, their old age. they I I think more attention should be paid to them and the the focus should not just be on growing the economy, but really how to make people live happily. And this mainly involves first improve the public service provision and secondly, cultural revitalization. So I think the cultural revitalization or the community revitalization aspect have been downplayed if not overlooked in the overall rural revitalization campaign.
Matthew
Now we’re going to map out where this is all heading, and walk through four distinct pictures of rural China. Through four scenarios, we'll break down what each place looks like today, who is actually living and farming there, and the specific vulnerabilities they face in the coming decades.
Let's start with the rural areas immediately surrounding the wealthy coastal cities. We'll call this Scenario 1: the suburbanization model.
Forrest
If we use Hangzhou for example, the rural areas surrounding Hangzhou. Hangzhou located in the plain area, It's traditionally the most fertile agricultural land in China, very well irrigated and flat topography. Places like Yuhang, Lin’an. Nowadays, and because those are primary farmland, so they can only be devoted to grain production. There used to be some, you know, vegetable or landscape trees.
But that have been converted all back into grain production because they're classified now as primary farmland. But the local villagers, you know, they live on the outskirts of Giujiang. There are all kinds of economic opportunities. Many of them for many years are running small private enterprises, some of them not so small. So they've already made a lot of money from non-farm economy.
So if we go to a village in Yuhang, for example, the villagers live in two or three story mansions, these are dreams of urban people. Urban people would never, unless you're a Jack Ma or somewhere, would never have the luxury to live in that kind of mansion. But the rural folks, they have their own land and they have money. So they build very, very nice houses. And they don't do farming anymore. They have quit the farming for a long time. So and so all the land in those villages, for example, have all been consolidated by the village collective and then the village collective rented it out to large scale operators. And so it's large scale mechanized rice production done by basically professional agribusiness. Whereas the farmers, the villagers still live there in their very nice mansions, but they are doing non-agricultural economy.
Matthew
And because those villages are located close to the city and the environment is quite nice - a scenic landscape surrounded by rice fields - they’ve essentially become tourist destinations.
Forrest
So during the weekends, the urban folks from Hangzhou would drive their car or ride their bicycle to those villages to spend a day or even a couple of days there. There are cafes, there are restaurants, there are cycling clubs, there are all kinds of activities for kids, for family. So those kind of villages really become a suburb. While at the same time, unlike suburbs in the United States, there's still agricultural production. But the only difference compared to the past is that agricultural production is done by agribusiness on a large scale. Whereas the native villagers, they're not doing farming anymore. Some of them may run bed and breakfast or may run some tourist business. So this is one model. And we can call it the suburbanization model. We find that a lot in the east coast.
Matthew
So here you have a mix of mechanized agricultural production, and cultural tourism, and even some middle-upper class moving out of cities for a different type of life.
The next scenario we’ll call the Outsourced industrial agriculture model, and it features large scale grain production, largely in the north and northeast of the country.
Forrest
Another scenario is in the northern plain in Henan, Shandong and Hebei. Again, much of the farmland there is primary farmland has to be devoted to grain production under the national food security policy, right? And if you are doing grain production, large scale is always more competitive.
Their natural conditions are also conducive to large scale production. So these farmers - what happened to these villages is what I mentioned earlier that basically the farming will be taken over by large-scale operators. Even the remaining small family farmers, they outsource their production to specialized service providers.
They pick up a phone. When it's sowing time - call the operator, the operator would come in and you know, do the plowing, do the sowing. And when it's time to apply pesticide, they make another phone call, the operator would come in, use a drone to spray pesticide and do everything. And when it's harvesting time they make another phone call, then the harvester will come in, harvest everything. So the family farmer really the only thing they need to do is irrigation, which requires some labor input. Other than that, basically it's all outsourced.
Matthew
Some of the farms in this scenario may stay small, while others will grow to hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of hectares in size. And as the population ages, Forrest doesn’t expect that will pose too much of a problem for production, since most of it is already mechanized and outsourced.
The third scenario, however, won’t scale that large. And because it requires a lot of labor and it’s difficult to mechanize, the aging population does pose a problem.
Here we’re talking about intensive vegetable production. There’s hundreds of varieties, and in terms of quantity, just in the greater Beijing area, 100,000s of metric tonnes of vegetables are eaten each day. We’re calling this scenario High-value horticulture, and if we were to do another episode in the Feeding 1 in 6 series, this is exactly what it would have focused on.
Forrest
There has been a thriving labor-intensive vegetable production, right? So this is still family-based in places like Shouguang, greenhouse vegetable production, very labor-intensive, very capital intensive as well. Not just to build a greenhouse, it's hundreds of thousands of yuan to build one. And then you know, every year the input is a lot of money as well.
So basically it's operated, yearly operated by a couple. And it's very labor intensive. They're fully occupied because vegetable production, the production cycle is relatively short. One month or 45 days, they start another cycle. So they're busy all the time.
And their income is very decent. It's hard work. It's definitely hard work. But they have a very decent income. So they don't need to go elsewhere to do, you know, migrant labor work. They are basically a small business and it's a thriving small business. Every year their income can be hundreds of thousands of yuan. But it's very hard work and because they're exposed to all the agrochemical they use in the greenhouse, their health suffers as well. They got all kinds of you know, disease. Cancer rates is relatively high. And so there is a dark side to that.
Matthew
So this high-income model hides a massive physical cost. And Forrest says this system has to confront a two-part vulnerability in the future. The first part is on the production end.
Forrest
I think that scenario, 20 years down the road, I'm very concerned about that type of agricultural system because it's so labor intensive. And as the current generation ages, and now most of the farmers are already in their fifties, if not sixties, right?
So within twenty years, again, as I said, their health already suffered. Within twenty years, if they can last that long, that generation is going to exit from farming. And this kind of labor-intensive vegetable horticulture production cannot be easily scaled up through mechanization and all that. What will happen to that will become a major challenge. So migration can help a little bit, but China is running out of internal migrants as well. So we're already seeing that. They are increasingly relying on migrants from southwest China, ethnic minorities, Yi ethnic minority, Miao ethnic minority from Guizhou and Bing Nan to supply the farm labor. But that labor pool is going to run out as well, right? So there's a huge challenge for that scenario.
Matthew
The second part of this vulnerability is on consumption. Demand for vegetables in China and other southeast Asian countries is especially high.
Forrest
It's not just a large volume of vegetables but also variety, right? So if you go to Beijing, the Xifadi wholesale market, you see a whole variety of vegetable you've never seen elsewhere.
And in Chinese cities, in southern China, even more varieties, seasonal, local, vegetable varieties. And that's still a very important part of the Chinese diet. I think that is where the greatest challenge that the Chinese agricultural system faces. In meat, for example, pork, it can be relatively more easily scaled up. You probably have seen this 22-story building of a pig farm, right?
Matthew
Yeah, we covered an episode on the vertical pork sector.
Forrest
Right. Exactly. So the livestock operation you can vertically stack up and you can increase in scale and doesn't really demand, as high labor demand, as the vegetable production. I think vegetable is the biggest challenge. Vegetable and fruit. Horticulture basically together. It's labor intensive and it's a lot of variety and it's also very perishable. I think everywhere in China vegetable sector faces the greatest labor challenge. And that's a challenge I don't see a clear solution to that. So I'm very concerned about that.
Matthew
That brings us to our fourth and final scenario, located in the mountainous regions of Southwestern China. We’re calling this “A return to subsistence ]farming.”
Forrest (41:18.684)
For example in Wing Nan, in Su Chuang, Chongqing, in Hunan. These are areas that used to be densely populated. Now a lot of people have moved out, younger people, but the older people staying there, what I recently observed is that they are going through - they're undergoing another reverse transition from industrial agriculture back to more ecological farming. Why? Because now they're older and they are more or less freed from the social reproduction pressure. In other words, they've already built the house, they've already married their children, and they have health related issues which require some expenses, but rural welfare has also improved quite a lot.
So their daily cash expenses is not all that heavy, right? So their agricultural production can basically primarily target toward self-consumption. So instead of really doing commercial production, trying to maximize their output and sell on the market, which often means that using agrochemical input, and doing monoculture. Now they are shifting back toward subsistence based farming. They're basically producing for self consumption. They will still have surplus, but the surplus will be sold on the local market, which you know is easily accessible. As these people age, they will increasingly shift back toward subsistence farming because it's basically just for self consumption. So I think that's another scenario in especially this mountainous part of China that doesn't have great potential for commercial agriculture. It's small scale, it's fragmented land and it's not very accessible to a large market. You can't do large scale production and it's not very commercially viable for commercial agriculture. So they'll gradually shift more and more toward subsistence farming. And they're, more importantly, they were going through ecological transition back to more ecological ways of production.
Matthew
A quick pause to say that ecological farming and subsistence farming are not the same. In the rice episode we discussed how some farmers were too poor to purchase farm inputs, making them, by default, ecological farmers. On the other hand, some producers are intentionally marketing their products as safe to eat, high-value organic food.
Forrest
I think there is potential there for that ecological transition to happen. It both serves the urban demand, although it's not a huge quantity, but at least for the local market it provides an alternative choice that a lot of urban consumers are looking for. On the other hand, it also fits into the livelihood strategy of the aging villagers very well. That’s the fourth scenario, but there are obviously more.
Matthew
Four different scenarios. Not equal in their likelihood or their scale. Each dictated by a unique set of constraints - geography, ecology, market access, demographic trends. Listening to Forrest break this down is incredibly instructive. It also highlights a fair critique of the SystemIQ paper we covered last episode, which to be fair, was discussing more about animal agriculture. But still, this well researched paper presented a single, sweeping scenario for the entire country.
Forrest (57:09.212)
This is also a reflection I had after listening to your episode about the alternative protein. I think China has always taken this approach, that is try everything. like the Chinese saying “that adults don't make choices, we try everything.” So China is always trying everything in terms of the technological development.
So China is definitely investing a lot in alternative protein, but doesn't mean China is really banking on that as a solution for food security in the future, because China is simultaneously trying a whole bunch of other things as well. So in terms of addressing the ecological challenge, you're definitely right that China is trying all these precision technology, trying to increase the efficiency of agrochemical input, but at the same time there are also other experiments. However, I want to say that the state is lending more support to the technocratic solutions of new technology, whereas not a lot of support is given to the agroecological approach. But there are a lot of civil society organization, activists they're pursuing that and they are doing all kinds of approaches and they're having more and more success.
Matthew
The final factor for what the countryside might look like is to pay attention to how Chinese diets have shifted and will continue changing. Recent data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey shows that the younger generation - 7 to 18-year-olds - is being raised predominantly on an industrialized diet full with ultra-processed foods, processed meats, and sugary drinks. As we’ve seen throughout the world, this diet shift will inevitably place a massive, long-term burden on the healthcare system.
But Forrest suggests that this pressure, plus the ecological crises triggered by decades of intensive farming, might catalyze a national pivot, to what he calls a "sustainability turn."
Forrest
In today’s Chinese agri-food sector. There is over supply, over production of food. That’s why food in China is so cheap. They're too cheap because too much is being produced. On the one hand, I think this is a result of the central government's obsession with food security. So they want, you know, the farmland protection, so much land has to be devoted to agricultural production. And you know, all these investment in technology to maximize the output.
The result is that there is an oversupply in terms of volume, which made food very cheap in China. Of course, cheap food encourages overeating. But I think that there may be a shift in that trend as well. As the population size declines and as the people become more health conscious and also on the production side as the farming labor supply also declines, aging accelerates, the agricultural production decline, supply will decline.
So food will become more expensive. Once food becomes more expensive, people will be more selective. So again this is a scenario that can happen, but I have no confidence to predict what is the likelihood that that may happen. But that gives us an opportunity to really at least gradually implement some shift to agricultural production. That's what I mentioned that with the “sustainability turn”. A sustainability transition can become possible. That in the near future, the Chinese agricultural system no longer has to be so obsessed with maximizing output, right? Feeding the population is no longer a problem. Now the challenge is how to feed the population better. And at the same time, preserve the environment, helping farmers to raise their income.
And all this means that actually using a more ecological method to produce food, to produce better food, this may mean that food price will increase, but you're getting better stuff. And the better food will also help the people to eat less and eat better, which also contributed to their health. So you know, a lot a series of positive changes can happen together, but it needs a lot of work.
Matthew
I won't try to predict what China's countryside will look like in thirty years. I'm not sure anyone can. But after this conversation, I keep coming back to three things.
First is the difference between grains and horticulture. Producing staple foods like wheat and rice have become more mechanized and automated over the years. Combines, drones, sensors and precision equipment are doing work on areas of land that literally millions of Chinese smallholders used to.
But high-value horticulture like fresh fruit, vegetables, and some aquaculture tells a different story. It still requires human hands, and human knowledge, to grow, pick, sort, and check the hundreds of different varieties. As the generation of farmers who do that work retires, the contrast between those two systems is stark: grain fields don’t feel the labour shortage, while the produce fields do.
The second point is, depending on your view, you might either see these dynamics as a huge vulnerability - or possibly, an opportunity. The vulnerability is more obvious. Without some innovation leap in agricultural robotics, or a fresh labor pool, the fresh food urban Chinese expect may become more expensive to produce, or it could lead to some supply shock. But there's an opportunity tangled up in that same risk. Forty years of China's growth ran on rural labor that was undervalued. A labor crunch could change that, and force the market to pay farmers more.
That connects to a bigger shift, which I hadn't fully appreciated until this conversation. For decades, Chinese food policy had one obsession. That was to outrun scarcity, whatever the cost. China successfully shifted from will there be enough food and is the food safe to eat, to abundant and diverse food. And now, the population is shrinking, food is oversupplied and the ecological bill for decades of chemical-intensive farming is here.
This could offer an opening. Without the pressure to forever increase yields, there's room for what Forrest calls a “sustainability turn”: feeding the country better instead of feeding it more. But that works only if food production is valued more, which in a non-abstract way, translates to paying more for it.
The Chinese Communist Party has kept food prices fairly low, which leads me to a series of questions. Can they stay this low forever? Will an urban middle class actually be willing, and able, to pay more for its groceries? What if the economy stalls, does this green agricultural turn remain a fringe one instead of a national one?
And that leads me to my final point. This won't be a single story, because there isn't a single future for China's food system. The differences aren't just urban versus rural, they're regional, shaped by geography and topography as much as by policy. This is what likely lead to some combination of: tech-driven suburbs, industrial-scale grain belts, high-value horticulture, and mountainous villages shifting back to something closer to subsistence farming.
What do you take from this episode? And this series more broadly? Do you see parallels with the food systems in your country?
Send us an email or voice memo to podcast@tabledebates.org
Thanks so much for listening. This series is a collaborative production between the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and TABLE. Supported by National Philanthropic Trust. Produced, edited and hosted by me, Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Talk to you soon.