Di China, banyak petani yang semula miskin, sekarang
punya mobil dan jalan-jalan keluar negeri. Buah China
menggeser buah dari California, Australia dan New
Zealand di super market di Tokyo dan Singapura. Di
Jakarta sudah lama terjadi.
Tidak semua suku China kepintarannya hanya dagang
saja. Ada suku yang bakatnya tani, dan tidak pintar
dagang. Ada suku yang bakatnya tukang kayu dan segala
jenis tukang lainnya, dan tidak pintar dagang. Ada
suku yang bakatnya jadi pegawai, dokter, guru dan
semacamnya, dan tidak pintar dagang. Dengan adanya
kekhususan itulah, maka China menjadi naga dunia.
Cerita di FEER kali ini khusus mengenai orang yang
hebat di hortikultura.
Salam,
RM
(Far Eastern Economic Review)
FOOD POLICY
Peasants Bloom
A revolution in farming practices is bringing wealth
to the Chinese countryside. It is also bringing China
into fierce competition with the world's biggest food
producers, among them the United States
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Andrew Browne/LAI YANG, SHANDONG PROVINCE
Issue cover-dated October 14, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AT AN AGE when many men in China have eased into
retirement, Song Jiejun, 57, is starting all over
again. The former village police chief has set up home
with an attractive new wife 25 years his junior, he's
become a father again and he's bought his first car.
THE WORLD'S BIGGEST FARM
•
China's growers now produce half the world's
vegetables and melons
•
Export opportunities have been opened by WTO
membership
•
Diminishing state control over food production has
allowed Chinese farmers to play to their strengths
And to support this new lifestyle Song has made a late
career change: he's now a vegetable farmer.
Daybreak finds a tanned and sprightly Song at his
fields in coastal Shandong province supervising
peasants as they pluck okra, a vegetable seldom eaten
locally but a pricey delicacy across the sea in Japan,
where most of the slender pods end up.
In many ways, Song's new lease on life mirrors the
rejuvenation of large parts of China's rural economy.
There's money in farming these days. China has turned
into a market stand for much of Asia, and the upshot
for the world's food exporters could be just as
profound as the impact of China's transformation into
the manufacturing "workshop of the world."
"We've taken on the Japanese market," boasts Song,
with his keys jangling from one hip and a mobile phone
from the other. "In time we'll take on the Americans
too."
Across large swaths of coastal China, traditional
plots for grain are giving way to orchards and
greenhouses. The shimmering light under aircraft
approaching Shanghai's airport, often mistaken by
travellers for the sea, is in fact miles of clear
plastic swaddling rows of vegetables. The crops feed a
swelling population of wealthy city dwellers. And
while only a fraction is exported, it is enough to
challenge major growers in markets they once owned.
Fresh Chinese broccoli now finds its way into Tokyo
lunch boxes, replacing Californian varieties. Apples
from the United States are being shut out of Singapore
and Hong Kong by Chinese exports.
So far, the threat to the world's producers has been
mainly in export markets. China has a long way to go
before it can match international standards for
quality. Its agricultural technology lags badly;
cooling and storage facilities are primitive; farmers
too often saturate crops with harmful pesticides and
overload the exhausted soil with chemical fertilizer.
Yet, as in manufacturing, China is learning fast. Part
of the impetus is coming from export opportunities
opened by China's membership of the World Trade
Organization. Chinese farming is getting better "very
quickly," says Richard Herzfelder, executive
vice-president of China Food and Agricultural Services
Inc., a Shanghai-based consultancy. Many assumed it
would take 10 years from WTO accession in 2001 before
China could match the quality of U.S. fruit. The best
farms already can. "They're progressing twice as fast
as people thought," Herzfelder says.
In the 1980s, the U.S. was the world's biggest
producer of apples. Now China produces four times as
many. American apple sales to Singapore have halved in
the past five years while Chinese exports have
doubled, giving China almost 60% of the market in the
prosperous city state. Chinese broccoli sales to Japan
have tripled since 1995, while American exports are
down by a third. "We're being hammered" in certain
markets, says Tracy King, export director of the
Washington Apple Commission.
Much is riding on a struggle among Chinese
policymakers. The traditionalists, obsessed with food
security, want the focus of agricultural policy to
remain on grain self-sufficiency. But those who favour
free trade support the shift toward higher-value
horticulture as a way to raise rural incomes and play
to China's advantages. Horticulture uses less
farmland, a dwindling resource in China, and more
labour, which China has in abundance.
Some see evidence that the reformers are coming out on
top. "There's been a seminal change in the tenor of
the discussion," says Dan Rosen, a visiting fellow at
the Institute for International Economics. "On the
face of it, California has a China problem," he says.
Other forces, too, are propelling the shift toward the
free market. A law passed last year gives farmers more
secure rights to the tiny plots of land they hold
under 30-year leases. That has a created a more liquid
market in land. Millions of peasants are sub-leasing
their land to move to the cities, where they can make
a better living. The plots vacated are being stitched
together into sizeable holdings, so that in many
places subsistence farming is being replaced by
commercial farming.
Between now and 2020, some 300 million peasants are
expected to migrate to urban areas, giving further
impetus to farm consolidation. At the same time, China
is embarked on a mammoth project to build a national
highway network. Suddenly, once-remote farms can start
growing perishable crops like lettuce and strawberries
and rush them to markets at home and abroad.
China now produces half the world's vegetables and
melons--five times more than India and 11 times more
than the U.S.--compared with just over one third in
1995. Meanwhile, output of broccoli, carrots and other
vegetables and tomatoes has more than doubled. Over
the same period, China's planted area for vegetables
has jumped by 89% and for fruit by 16%, while the area
sown with grain has dropped by 10%.
Down on the farm, Song and people like him aren't
waiting around for the outcome of the policy debate.
Entrepreneurial and politically savvy, they are
changing the face of farming by working deals to lease
land and link up with hi-tech food processing
businesses, marketing and distribution networks.
Song has assembled 100 mu (6.6 hectares) of land that
once supported several dozen families. "If I was young
again I'd have 10,000 mu," he says.
Like many farmers around Lai Yang, Song produces
exclusively for a local agribusiness called Longda
Foodstuff Group Co. The privately owned company has
itself amassed more than 1,300 hectares and has
brought in tenant farmers to grow crops and raise
pigs. The output goes mainly to food-processing
factories that supply domestic buyers and export
markets, primarily Japan.
More than 400,000 peasants and factory workers owe
their livelihood to Longda, or "big dragon." The
company reported profits last year equivalent to $12
million on sales of more than $200 million.
To maintain quality, Longda controls the entire
production process for both its own tenant farmers and
suppliers like Song. Its tenants are on one-year
contracts that can be terminated instantly if they
breach production rules, with the forfeit of a cash
deposit.
In many ways, Longda represents the industrialization
of Chinese agriculture. Indeed, the company video
boasts that Longda is "changing the traditional
lifestyle of Chinese peasants" by turning them into
"industrial workers."
On a recent sweltering summer morning, a call on his
mobile phone made Song snap to attention at his farm
gate: Longda was ordering him to plant onions. Quickly
he summoned his wife on her motor scooter to bring
cash from home. Then he dashed off to Longda's
warehouses--the only authorized purchase point--to buy
seed and fertilizer. Over lunch he made a few calls to
arrange for 30 peasants to turn up the next day for
planting.
"I grow what they tell me, when they tell me," says
Song. Longda agronomists turn up regularly to ensure
he follows company procedure on the use of fertilizers
and pesticides.
His partnership with Longda has paid off handsomely
for Song. In the four years he has been growing for
the company he has made on average $5,000 a year.
That's roughly double the pay he took home as a police
commander. The peasants who plant and pick for him
earn less than $2 a day.
It's a similar story all along the vast Chinese coast.
High standards are being demanded by Japan and South
Korea, which provide the largest export markets along
with much of the technology and investment. For
instance, in the world's most extensive broccoli
growing area, a fertile plain south of Shanghai,
farmers got started in the early 1990s with seeds
introduced by Japanese trading companies.
"We didn't know what broccoli was back then," says Guo
Chenggen, a local producer who now ships 130
refrigerated containers a year to Japan.
Wealth is trickling down to small farmers like Zhu
Zhongyi, 60, whose patched trousers may be held up
with string but whose gleaming new house rises from
the edge of his broccoli patch no bigger than a
quarter of a hectare. "It's for my son," he explains
proudly, pointing to the three-storey building. "I'm
too old to worry about myself."
Raising living standards in the countryside, home to
800 million of China's 1.3 billion people, is a
priority for President Hu Jintao. Farm taxes are being
phased out and replaced by subsidies to narrow the
wide gap between rural and urban incomes. But the path
to rural prosperity is likely to be rocky.
Horticulture threatens to open up a new divide in
Chinese society between the rural haves and the
have-nots in grain and soybean-growing areas, raising
the prospect of a fresh potential cause of social
turmoil. There's also a danger that a flood of cheap
Chinese fruit and vegetables could ignite
protectionism in Asia and elsewhere.
Nor is the picture for the world's other food
producers all bleak. As Chinese farmers grow more
fruit and vegetables, imports of U.S. soybeans have
been rocketing. Chinese agronomists predict China will
import more feed grains like maize, as well as cash
crops like sugar and cotton.
Song, meanwhile, is counting on export markets staying
open. With a young wife and a six-year-old daughter,
he says, "I have to make enough money to leave behind
when I go."
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