Turning Pork into Beef: The Effects of Urbanization on China's Food Policy

One of the things I was most excited about in China, prior to coming here, was the food. Even though NYC has some incredible Chinese food---dim sum, Sichuanese, Xian, and of course the all American General Tso’s Chicken---I figured it had to be even better live. On the whole that’s been true; check out these pictures of some delicious treats I’ve had around the country:

Xinjiang Lamb with Stir-Fried Naan (yes, delicious fried bread)

Sauteed String Beans with Pork and Sichuan Peppers

Vegetable Buns

Some kind of delicious Shrimp

But, while on a fellowship to study urban development, I’d be remiss to not talk about the implications of urbanization on agriculture, food policy, and food quality. Yes, I’m about to burst the bubble of deliciousness that I’ve just inflated…with some depressing wonking and policy analysis.

So…in the vain of Communist Revolution, Chairman Mao had organized rural China into collective and communal farms---cooperatives seized from landlords---that people would farm collectively and share in the produce. The large communes were supposed to create economies of scale that would produce enough food to feed EVERYONE. The result was quite the opposite: the Great Leap Forward diverted people from real agricultural work (and encouraged them to melt their farm tools into poor quality metal to meet steel production quotas), while those who did farm had no incentive (or ability) to actually produce efficiently. The result was famine that cost tens of millions of lives.

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping returned China to the family farming system that had served China so well before communism: households could now lease plots of land from the government and produce at least enough to meet government quotas. And they were allowed to sell their surplus at market price for a profit (incentivizing more production). Though this improved agricultural productivity and decreased rural poverty for some time, it coincided with a slow dismantling of the rural social welfare system and underinvestment in rural areas, as the governemtn began to focus on manufacturing and foreign investment around cities. Over time, a large wage gap between rural and urban areas emerged, and food production could not keep pace with the rising demand of the growing¾and increasingly rich¾urban population.

In the early 2000s, the national government enacted more reforms to help rural areas: farming cooperatives (now voluntary) were legalized, farmers were allowed to lease out or transfer land-use rights to other people for other purposes, as in urban areas. Farming accounted for 70% of China’s labor, but contributed less than 12% of GDP¾productivity was low and farming was clearly not a lucrative profession. At the same time, demand---especially for meat products and the grain to feed livestock---kept rising as city dwellers' tastes got fancier.

Because farming collectives were now able to lease their land to developers, who began to 'urbanize' it with high rise apartments and other infrastructure, farmland itself was decreasing. Other farmers left for cities when local governments requisitioned their land for development. And finally, many farmers simply leased their land to large scale (often corporate) agricultural operators while continuing to provide labor for those new venues. The hukou system, of course, made migration and and alternative futures even more difficult. The bottom line was that farming was not lucrative and farmland was diminishing---so many farmers abandoned their trade while demand continued to skyrocket.

To make up for the lost product, corporate farming techniques entered the Chinese marketplace. One benefit of these large, usually industrial farms was that, by virtue of their size and scale of investment and operations, they were more easily able to create economies of scale and produce more food per unit than individual farmers ever could have. Another was that they had mastered many of the technological and chemical innovations that made farming even more productive: new breeds of seeds that produced more grain per stock; fertilizers that caused vegetables to grow faster; incubators that could hatch millions of eggs into chickens that could be raised in controlled environments for easier integration into the supply chain. Without innovations like these, the world might not have had enough food to feed its rising population---and millions of people might have died of starvation or malnourishment, as the 18th century economist Thomas Malthus had predicted. A "Malthusian Catastrophe" was averted by industrialized farming.

But this system of industrialized farming has arguably been abused and run amock in many places, especially China. Farmers have been known to buy chemicals that, they were told, would boost their output. With little proof of their success or quality, they used the chemicals, with great consequences for the quality of their produce. Watermelons have exploded from being pumped with growth hormones; pigs and livestock have been plumped up with chemicals that have harmed consumers; vegetables have been filled with chemical cocktails that have caused cancer (one third of the world's cancer deaths occur in China, where cancer is responsible for 21% of all fatalities). At a weird point, extracts have been used on pork to turn it into beef. For real. (This is to say nothing of pure scams, like the one in which dumpling vendors allegedly filled their pork buns not with pork, but cardboard; or the Hot Pot restaurants that served lamb meat skewers that turned out to be made of rat). 

One of the most high profile cases of 'agricultural malpractice' has been in milk formula for infants. China's domestic producers---which have a monopoly on production and distribution---have been found to put melamine, a poisonous flame retardant, in their infant formula. Hundreds of thousands of babies were harmed. Many panic-stricken mothers stopped feeding their babies, while a huge industry has developed to fill the new demand for safe, foreign-made milk formula: smugglers have imported thousands if not millions of foreign produced milk packets from Hong Kong, which has no trade barriers with outside producers, and smuggled them into mainland China for resale. On my exit from Hong Kong airport, a sign at the check-in distinctly forbade the packing of more than two cans of formula per person. Out of desperation, smuggling of these safer products continues.

Many foreigners have cited uncertain food quality as a primary reason for why they would not live in China for longer. For the hundreds of millions of other residents of China who have no other choice, food quality presents a potentially fatal---and at present insurmountable--problem. The dilemma appears to be providing enough food on the one hand, or providing decent quality food on the other.

This is perhaps one of the worst consequences of China's rush to urbanize that the country must do far, far more to regulate. Though the loss of farmland to suburban subdivision in the United States caused similar problems, it has only been a vigilant, independent media and very active activists that have been able to curb the system's most extreme excesses. (See Food Inc and Fast Food Nation for accessible accounts of this). 

At present, these are two things that China lacks. As China foes from a net food importer to a net producer (and potential exporter), let's hope to god that this system has some better oversight.