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Chinese food self-provisioning: key sustainability policy lessons hidden in plain sight

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Abstract

Drawing on an exploratory study of urban food self-provisioning (FSP) in China, this article argues that progress in sustainability scholarship can be accelerated by embracing a greater diversity of framings of sustainability. It brings four important empirical findings concerning the prevalence of Chinese urban FSP, the social diversity of its practitioners, their primarily non-economic motivations, and production methods meeting the criteria for organic food that are deployed by more than a third of urban food growers. On this basis, the article highlights the importance of greater attention to identifying and valuing ‘already existing sustainability’ in non-Western contexts, rather than privileging Western conceptualizations of sustainability that promise sustainability innovation in the future.

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Notes

  1. This joint declaration, signed by 79 geographical societies from 58 countries, including China, Czechia, and the UK, calls on the global community to urgently address the global climate and biodiversity crises.

  2. In this article, by ‘sustainable food alternatives’ we understand initiatives, practices, and behaviours that epitomize a response to the detrimental environmental and social effects of industrialized agricultural food production by re-localizing and re-embedding food production in social networks and by limiting its environmental impacts. However, we advocate for a broad definition that allows for both market and non-market approaches, formal and informal, top-down and bottom-up, emerging and already existing.

  3. For example, only 15 per cent of Czech gardeners travel to their garden by car, while 65 per cent do not need to travel at all, as the garden is next to their house, and the remaining 20 per cent walk or travel there by bike or public transport (de Hoop and Jehlička 2017).

  4. It should be noted, however, that Chinese per capita negative effects concerning sustainability are significantly lower than those of Western societies (Global Footprint Network no date).

  5. One of the rare and recent exceptions is Asa Roast’s (2022) article on informal food production on urban ‘empty land’ (kongdi).

  6. The most recent official data from the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics available at the time of our survey (2019) was used to develop a sampling frame.

  7. The remaining 10 per cent of the interviewers conducted interviews with either very few respondents (2–3) or a larger number of respondents (7–10).

  8. No respondents were interviewed in Shanghai and Chongqing municipalities, in Gansu, Hainan, or Qinghai provinces, in the Macau Special Administrative Region, or in Ningxia Hui, Xinjiang Uyghur, or Tibet autonomous regions.

  9. The Chinese National Bureau of Statistics has not yet published a detailed breakdown of the 2020 Population Census, so direct comparison of the educational attainment of respondents with that of the Chinese urban population in general could not be conducted.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the students from Harbin Institute of Technology Weihai Campus, Guilin Tourism College, Liaoning Normal University, and Guizhou Normal University for conducting the interviews. Special thanks to Prof. Liu Er, Prof. Liu Chenye, Prof. Wu Yaping, and Prof. Yang Deyun for instructing students on fieldwork activity. Extra thanks to Prof. Liu Er for collating, screening, and pre-processing the gathered data. Special thanks to the members of the Professional Committee of Leisure Philosophy, Ji Juanli, Li Yinfeng, Liu Guiling, and Zhao Zijin, for their case interviews and detailed interview records, and to Prof. Örjan Sjöberg and Dr Terezie Lokšová for suggesting useful sources for this article. The authors also thank Huiying Ng for valuable comments on an earlier draft, the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the submission’s previous version, which contributed to its significant improvement, and Patty A. Gray for making the article a smoother read.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecological Anthropology, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Na Florenci 3, 110 00, Prague 1, Czechia

    Petr Jehlička

  2. Leisure Studies Center, Chinese National Academy of Arts, Building 14, Huaibaishujienanli, Xicheng District, 100053, Beijing, China

    Huidi Ma

  3. Department of Local and Regional Studies, Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Jilská 1, 110 00, Prague 1, Czechia

    Tomáš Kostelecký

  4. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, South Kensington, London, SW7 2AR, UK

    Joe Smith

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Jehlička, P., Ma, H., Kostelecký, T. et al. Chinese food self-provisioning: key sustainability policy lessons hidden in plain sight. Agric Hum Values (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10506-7

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