[from The Guardian]
Shanghai dispatch China faces agricultural revolution
Millions of Chinese farmers fear the growing impact of global agribusiness as they prepare for entry into the WTO, writes John Gittings
Tuesday November 13, 2001
Everyone agrees that China's entry into the WTO, formally approved at the Doha meeting, will result in "winners" and "losers" on the mainland - and that millions of Chinese farmers will be on the losing side.
There is likely to be a very unequal contest between mainland agriculture, where the average farm size is just half a hectare, and the vast expanses of US agribusiness, backed up by extensive farming in countries such as Argentina and Brazil.
Nowhere is the contest going to be more unequal than in the soya bean trade, which already involves very sizeable quantities. "Soya beans have been a 'bright spot' for producers selling bulk products to China," wrote an American Farm Bureau Federation analyst recently, noting that Chinese imports had "exploded" from under 2.5m tons per year in the early 1990s to over 10m tons in 2000, half of which came from the US.
WTO entry will only accelerate the trend with the removal of Chinese import quotas on soya beans, while the tariff will be pegged at the current low level of 3% and that on soya bean meal at 5%.
"This could ease the pressure on [Chinese] farmers," says the federation euphemistically, "to produce grains and oilseeds on low productivity land".
Soya beans have already been the subject of a serious US-China trade dispute, which at one time threatened to derail WTO entry and was only resolved at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting - attended by the US president, George Bush - last month in Shanghai.
Uncertainty over new Chinese regulations on imports of bio-engineered foods was holding up this year's shipments from the US and South America. The US government left in no doubt its commitment to its own growers: a trade adviser to the agriculture secretary explained that "it's a billion dollar market to us" and complained of "unreasonable delays".
Earlier, the agriculture department had produced an analysis of the new rules, warning that they could "become an obstacle" to China's WTO entry.
No one is saying exactly how the dispute has been resolved - and nothing has yet been produced on paper - but it appears that China has relaxed the rules. Since 70% of US soya beans are grown from genetically modified seeds, the only alternative was outright confrontation.
China's environmentalists are now sounding the alarm over another soya bean-related problem, with US agribusiness giant Monsanto as the alleged villain, which they claim could hit Chinese farmers even harder.
Monsanto has identified a molecular marker in wild soya beans which it says will help identify high-yielding varieties and increase yields. Last year it applied for patent protection, which (says Greenpeace's International Genetic Engineering Campaign) would apply to "all plants [wild and domesticated] in which these markers occur" as well as the screening processes to identify the markers, and any breeding method which uses them - whether for soya bean or any other crop.
The Monsanto claim, which Chinese protesters believe is based on a wild soya bean from southern China, was given front-page treatment in a recent issue of the Chinese investigative newspaper Southern Weekend. Greenpeace researchers at Shanghai's Fudan university have gathered evidence from Chinese agronomists refuting the claim.
Soya bean breeding expert Professor Gai Junyi argues that Monsanto is seeking a patent for "a discovery and not an invention". Many of the high-yielding soya bean "wild" varieties from China have in fact been bred by generations of farmers.
"These soya beans have been bred by our farmers," says Ren Zhenjing, an agricultural technician at the experimental soya bean farm of Nanjing Agricultural university. "Every year they gather the best seeds and plant them for the next season: it is an accumulation of peasant experience."
Monsanto said last month that it is "pursuing a patent for the technology only in the US" and that researchers elsewhere would be able to apply it to soya beans and other crops. Greenpeace argues that Chinese exports of soya could be affected and that farmers will live with the risk of patent infringement which may be pursued under WTO rules.
However this problem is resolved, it illustrates the growing impact of the global agribusiness on Chinese farmers who can do little but yield to market mechanisms.
Chinese leaders have made little secret of their hopes that agriculture will weather the hard times ahead and move towards some form of restructuring. The basic problem is not so much low productivity in the fields, but the lack of advanced processing plants near to the point of production, with too many small "backyard" crushers barely surviving.
A former oil plant manager argues that the industry was already in a poor state because too many plants were small-scale operations that also faced competition from smuggled oil products from abroad. Even without WTO, business was already shifting to the new soya crushing plants located near the coast and close to supplies of imported raw materials.
In theory, the soya bean problem will be solved as Chinese agriculture shifts to higher-value crops and livestock, produced on larger-scale farms. Just how China's huge rural network of small-scale farming can be "restructured" to do this is a mystery that has barely begun to be discussed.
Chinese agriculture was transformed nearly 20 years ago by the post-Mao rural revolution that handed back land use (though not ownership) to the individual peasant household.
The consequences of WTO entry will increase pressures for a second revolution - or else risk creating a new wave of rural discontent.
Email john.gittings at guardian.co.uk