Abstract
This book aims at providing students, experts and practitioners with a detailed overview of agricultural and food security issues in China, analyzed through the lenses of a multidisciplinary approach that enables to fully grasp the current socio-political challenges of transition towards more sustainable agricultural practices.
Confronted to a running decrease and degradation of its resources and rapidly evolving food habits, China became a net importer of food in 2004, and its agricultural balance has since become heavier every day. Beyond providing a comprehensive overview of these stakes, this book also presents consistent and original first hand research material, collected by the author during months of fieldwork in China, in the countryside and from various economic and political circles. Conclusions drawn from this often difficult to access fieldwork provides a detailed picture of the whole galaxy of public and private stakeholders taking part in agricultural modernization in China, and on the interests and patterns of power that underlie the development and implementation (of lack of implementation) of agricultural policies, shedding light on lock-ins that impede transition towards more sustainable models.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, food expenditures still accounted for about 35 percent of urban and rural budgets in 2012, and could reach 43 percent for poor rural households (calculations done with data from the National Bureau of Statistics).
- 2.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the average size of cultivated land per farmer is less than one hectare.
- 3.
The names of the counties were replaced by pseudonyms to protect the identity of interviewees.
- 4.
All counties were given pseudonyms, in order to protect our sources. Given that interviewees (individuals and companies) were sometimes selected among a small set of people and could be identified by their characteristics, it was indeed not sufficient to remove the names of these latest.
- 5.
As we will see, it was not as easy as in Jiangxi and Shandong to find fruits and vegetables production areas in Ningxia that could have been interesting for this research. Therefore, in Ningxia, we had to focus on other types of products (but it did not change the content of our conclusions).
- 6.
140 million tons of fruits and 577 million tons of vegetables. As a comparison, 543 million tons of cereals were produced this year. Source: FAO database.
- 7.
Original Language: “L’objet des politiques publiques n’est plus seulement de ‘résoudre des problèmes’ mais de construire des cadres d’interprétation du monde.”
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Schwoob, MH. (2018). Introduction. In: Food Security and the Modernisation Pathway in China. Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65702-8_1
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