Feeding 1 in 6. Who grows the rice (episode 3)

Episode summary

One-third of the world's rice is grown in China, on less than a fifth of the world's rice-growing area, by farmers whose average age is over 55, in a countryside that is slowly emptying. This episode asks how that's possible, and how much longer it can last.

[ Transcript available ]

About the guests

Lena Kaufmann

Lena Kaufmann is a social anthropologist at the University of Fribourg and current Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, whose work focuses on socio-technical transformations in rural China — including migration, agriculture, and the digitalization of farming. She is the author of Rural-Urban Migration and Agro-Technical Change in Post-Reform China (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and is currently leading a research project on the use of drones in agriculture across China and Europe. She has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese villages over more than two decades, and her work has been supported by multiple grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Li Zhang

Li Zhang is an assistant professor at Amherst College whose work sits at the intersection of development sociology, environmental justice, and public health in rural China. Her book The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2021) traces how the entanglement of Chinese authoritarianism and global capitalism increases the risk of diseases spilling over from animals to humans. She has a forthcoming book tentatively titled: Defying Slow Death: Unsafe Food, Governance, and Quiet Social Movements in China.