peasant living standards

A Practical Peasant Revolution in China

Ming painting China First Capital

It’s commonly held that the biggest threat to social stability, and therefore continued Chinese Communist Party rule, is a growing gap between rural and urban China. City folks grow prosperous while peasants struggle along in something akin to Neolithic poverty.  It’s a comfortable shorthand for understanding today’s China. But, it’s also increasingly far from the truth.

Rural China is undergoing a very powerful, if little noticed, transformation, as more agricultural production shifts to a system where peasants work for guaranteed cash wage to grow food. This is increasing incomes, as well as removing much of the risk from the traditional system where peasants would live off tilling their own small plot of land, and so be subject to all the hardships and vagaries that frequent unfavorable weather or adverse markets could deliver.

To be sure, there is still a  large gap in cash earnings of city and rural Chinese. This will likely always be true in China, as it is in the US and Europe. But, the gap in living costs is similarly large. You need far less money to live acceptably well in China’s countryside. The health care and education systems in rural China are also undergoing very powerful change, getting both better and cheaper for locals. While you can’t measure it precisely, because of huge differences in relative prices and purchasing power, my view is that the quality-of-life differential between city and rural China is fast getting narrower, rather than wider.

One primary force behind this change is the shift of more agricultural production to a wage-based system where peasants work as hired labor for the food, landscaping, Chinese medicine industries among others. In most cases, peasants are paid a guaranteed wage and given training as well as free fertilizer and pesticides to grow crops on their own land or fields leased by large companies. Beyond the basic wage, most will also earn bonuses depending on output. The bonuses may either be in cash or in kind: the peasant gets to keep and sell output above a pre-agreed minimum.

In Chinese, this rapidly-spreading agricultural contract production system is called 订单农业,”dingdan nongye“. It means farming done to fulfill fixed orders, at a fixed price, rather than growing things subject to the vagaries of nature and day-to-day market pricing. Deng Xiaoping gave peasants back their own land to farm. This new system is reducing much of the risk and struggle associated with peasant toil.

In Europe and the US, governments guarantee farmers a minimum income. But, their way of doing this is through market-distorting subsidies and protectionism that leads to higher food prices for consumers. The Chinese system is manifestly better.

In the last three years, I’ve visited quite a few companies and farming areas using this system as a key part of their business model. It is working well by all accounts, and spreading very quickly across rural China. From what I’m told, there is never a shortage of local peasants eager to participate in schemes like this. At a stroke, these peasants become fully part of the cash economy. Not only is the risk eliminated of suffering through a bad year, but it’s often possible for these peasants to work on, and profit from, a larger piece of land than their own small family plot.

In effect, this agricultural “putting out” system mirrors the way a lot of the manufacturing industry is organized in China. Manufacturing workers are given a fixed amount of work to do each month in return for a basic salary, and the promise of being paid regular bonuses for all output above the minimum. A similar system, for example, is in place at Foxconn, to encourage and reward all those thousands of workers turning out Apple iPads and iPhones.

In agriculture, this system solves one of a perennial problems both of Chinese farming and the Chinese food processing industry — small farm size, and so a lack of scale production. One example: I’m friendly with the boss of one of China’s largest brand-name “cellophane noodles” companies. They make vermicelli from sweet potato flour, a popular product across a lot of China. They need each year to secure an ever larger quantity of high-quality sweet potatoes. They can’t buy or rent an adequate amount of the land to farm themselves. So, they rely on a large number of Sichuan peasants to grow for them, based on annual contracts, with fixed salary and bonus.

A similar system is used by China’s largest producer of certain roots used commonly in Chinese medicine. The company now has about 35,000 acres under cultivation in an area of Northwestern China most suitable for producing these medicinal herbs. The local peasants have been growing these herbs for centuries, but with variable quality and unpredictable yields. The company has systematized the growing process. The impact on local peasant incomes has been profoundly positive.  In addition, it now means there is a reliable supply of high-quality pharmacologically-active plants being grown every year. The company provides seeds, fertilizer, and what’s known in America as “agricultural extension” — experts who work with local peasants to make sure everything is being grown efficiently, using the correct amount of fertilizer and irrigation.

The owner of this Chinese medicine herbs business also owns the largest beef processing company in this region of China. Here too, the basic production process is the same — peasants raise the cattle for the company, following strict standards, in return for salaries and bonuses.

The Chinese government, which is attentive to the need to improve rural living standards, is generally supportive of this agricultural contracting system. In some cases, they will also rent farm land to companies on condition that they use this wage-based system to employ local peasants. I have no first-hand knowledge of any skullduggery here, of peasants being turfed off their own land, so that they must take jobs working for some giant food company. Does it happen? Might it happen? China is a big country, with half a billion peasants. But, my sense is that overall, this new agricultural production system is an optimal way to increase incomes and decrease the toil and hardships of farming in China.

Along with helping peasants to live better, and drawing more peasants back home from factory jobs in urban areas, it’s also allowing agricultural processing companies to grow larger in scale, and increase the quality and distribution of their products. I have the opportunity to travel quite often in rural and semi-rural parts of China. I’m always struck, as an American, by the contrast between farmland in China and the US. America is blessed with so much fertile, flat and well-irrigated land.

In China, farmland discloses even to an untrained eye the fact it’s been in continuous cultivation for longer than just about anywhere else on the planet. The land looks tapped out, and chopped into parcels too small for machinery or efficient growing.  Nothing is going to change this. But, the new system of guaranteed wages, provided along with the necessary inputs or fertilizer and pesticide, is perhaps the most workable solution, as well as the one providing the most direct benefits to those who work the land.

Thirty-five years on, China’s market economy remains the most successful engine ever for lifting masses of farming people out of poverty.

 

 

Good News About China’s Food Price Inflation: Chinese Peasants’ Time of Unprecedented Plenty

Bamboo painting from China First Capital blog post

Food prices in China, as everyone inside and outside the country now knows, are rising fast, in some cases by over 30% during 2010. The Chinese government puts some of the blame on speculators who are said to be buying large quantities of fresh food, holding it off the market and then profiting from price increases. There seems to be some evidence of this.

There’s no short-term fix for these price increases. The Chinese government has released for sale some of its food stocks. It is also urging peasants, and local cadres who govern rural China, to make sure more food is grown next year to increase supplies. The peasants probably won’t need any such encouragement.

The increases this year in food prices have done more, in a shorter time, to lift income levels for many of China’s 600 million peasants than any other single measure taken over the last 30 years.

There has never been a  better time, in China’s long agrarian history, to be a peasant. Fundamentally, food price inflation in China represents a colossal transfer of wealth from China’s more affluent urban areas to the rural hinterland where half of China’s population still lives.

If this lasts, it will narrow the gap in living standards and income levels between China’s cities and countryside. This is one of the overarching goals of the Chinese government. And yet, no one is applauding.

Instead, the Chinese central government has reacted with some alarm to the recent price increases. It knows that higher food prices are putting the squeeze on city-dwellers, including, of course, those in the capital Beijing and other major cities. In China, communist power originally took hold in the countryside, and a lot of party doctrine still speaks about its roots among the peasantry. But, political power today is firmly rooted in urban areas.  China’s political, economic and cultural elite all live in major cities, as do most of their friends and family. So, price rises effect this group directly.

When apples, the staple autumn fruit in most of China,  almost double in price, as they have this year, political leaders will soon hear about it. The fact that China’s apple farmers now have a lot more money in their pockets is not necessarily part of the political calculus.

Yet, it is undeniable that the fastest and most effective way to raise peasant living standards and real incomes is higher farm prices that don’t fuel overall inflation. There are signs that’s now the case, that the only area of significant double-digit inflation is in food prices. If so, this is unquestionably the best time in Chinese history to be tilling the land.

How long will this last? Of course, commonly, a spike in food prices leads to overall price levels rising as well. This can erode, or even wipe out,  the rise in income for farmers from higher food prices. Also, today’s high prices will certainly lead to more land being cultivated next year, as farmers chase the fat profits from today’s prices.

I was just in Jiangsu Province, in central China, and it seemed like most of the farmland is under plastic cover this winter, allowing peasants to keep growing and selling vegetables. Supply goes up, price comes down. Eventually.

How high are food prices at present? Looking around my local covered market, prices in the stalls for many fruits and vegetables are now as higher or higher than prices commonly seen in the US. Looking just at autumn fruit, apples are about $1 a pound; navel oranges around 60 cents; clementines about $1 a pound; bananas are 50 cents a pound. Meat prices have risen sharply.

Pork remains comparatively cheap at about $2 a pound, but chicken is quite a bit higher here. Garlic and ginger, the two fundamental staples of all Chinese cooking, are both at all-time highs of around $1 a pound.

So far, in my experience, higher food prices haven’t yet fed through to higher prices at restaurants, noodle shops or even the outdoor steamer wagon where I buy corn-on-the-cob and potatoes as snacks. This means restaurant margins must be hurting. One notable exception, McDonalds in China. They recently announced price increases to counter effect of rising raw material costs.  With about 900 restaurants in China, all in larger cities, McDonalds feeds a lot of people.

Wages are also rising very steeply in urban China, as is household wealth for anyone who owns property. This seems to be allowing most urban Chinese to absorb higher food costs without much of a fuss.

In other words, just about everyone across this country of 1.4 billion is doing much better, year by year. For now, the 600 million peasants are doing best of all. Viewed across the breadth of China’s long history, no less than across the last 30 years of unparalleled economic progress, this is a singularly welcome development.

.