Agribusiness Coming To China: Pushing The Peasants Off The Land

by Stowe Boyd

A recently hinted-at "economic reform" intended to put money into the hands of Chinese farmers is a landgrab for agribusiness:

[via China Announces Land Policy Aimed at Promoting Income Growth in Countryside by Edward Wong]

Scholars and government advisers said in interviews during the four-day session that the new policy would allow China’s more than 800 million peasants to engage in the unrestricted trade or sale of land-use contracts, good for decades, that are given to them by the government. Adopting such a system would be a significant move toward privatization.

Since early October, state news media have run stories extolling the virtues of a system in which farmers would be able to trade, purchase or sell their land rights.

Old greenhouses, Qingcheng via FlickrOh great. So the peasants will sell their land and/or land rights, and a fraction of them will remain as workers -- probably migrant workers -- and the rest will move to the cities, with their tiny bag of money, and look for work.

This is going to be the largest displacement of people from the land, ever.

And five years later many of the displaced will wish they could go back to a time when they lived in a village, with friends and family, and where growing and eating food was largely outside the cash economy.

China has an opportunity to experiment with in situ modern land use; alas, I fear they will step smack into the 19th century, when the British enclosed the commons to increase productivity of farming, making serious bank for the landed and wealthy, leading to the diaspora of English farmers and an explosion of urban crime, pollution, and disease.

China is already the world's leading exporter of fruits and vegetables, so the pressure to capitalize on industrial agribusiness there is huge. So we can expect the largest rise in agricultural pollution, desertification from pumping out all the groundwater to accelerate growth of crops, and the rapid urbanization of China as the people leave the land and head to the cities.

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