Re-Shaping Chinese Agronomy

What could be more basic than a country's ability to feed itself? When all is said and done, industry and the manufacture of goods for export and trade enhance a country's economic status, and enables it to advance its financial capabilities, but when it neglects its primary needs to become reliant on the importation of food, it has lost the great advantage of self-sufficiency.

In a country the size of China, with its massive population, where so much of the population traditionally subsistence-farmed, it must have seemed sensible, under communism, to demand that peasant holdings and small farms merge into publicly-owned collectives. Under the communist ideal, people would be willing and eager to work together for the common good.

That's not quite what happened in the U.S.S.R. when it was discovered that communal farming offered no personal rewards for workers, and because there was no personal incentive, the enterprise collapsed. Workers were unwilling to invest their sweat and their labour in something that wouldn't benefit them personally. Free enterprise is natural to human nature.

In China, before the Communist Revolution, there were private landholders, and many were wealthy. Their production was capable of feeding large populations, because of their successful, self-availing enterprise. They were targeted as enemies of the people, their land claimed the possession of the state under collectivism, and the land doled out for the use of small farming.

China has 800-million farmers, with 193 working farms under five acres in size. Their collective harvest has remained static, despite the advances in modern agricultural techniques. There is an official recognition that transformative weather conditions could have a truly adverse effect leading to huge crop failures and mass starvation.

Because Chinese farmers are incapable of earning a modest living, 8.5 annually abandon their plots, gravitating to the cities. China's immense metropolises are growing at an ever increasing rate. Requiring larger harvests to feed their urban populations.

Bearing in mind that China has also established an agricultural export trade, earning it additional revenues, along with its mass exportation of manufactured goods.

The government of China has signed agreements with a number of African countries for the lease of prime agricultural lands there, where it has sent Chinese farmers to practise more modern techniques of agronomy, sending back their results to China. Which process avails those African governments' treasuries, but does nothing whatever to feed the growing hungry in Africa.

China has also decided to permit these small farm holdings to be sold to larger farm developers whose agribusiness farming has proven to be far more intensive and successful than the meagre crops of subsistence farming. The country has for far too long ignored the needs of its agricultural workers, with its intensive focus on factory production for overseas export.

In a faltering international economy, the country is now beginning to experience a weaker export market, with fewer countries continuing to demand its cheaper products. The country's intense focus on modernizing its cities and urban roadways and in the process neglecting the countryside and its peasants has its repercussions. Education in the far reaches of the country has been neglected.

There is stark resentment between urban dwellers and their rural counterparts. One advantaged through the disadvantage of the other. There, while a growing middle class has begun to emerge, with fewer people living in dire poverty, there is still the issue of advantage and disadvantage, the middle class living well, the peasants far less so.

None of this is conducive to the attainment of what China aspires to above all, a "harmonious society".