TAKING THE COUNTRYSIDE: WHY AGRIBUSINESS MAY REAP PROFITS AND PROBLEMS FOR CHINA

 
Geoff Dyer
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
 
 
When he was 19 years old, Yan Haichun was dispatched to a bleak stretch of fields just outside Shanghai to work on a collective farm. China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong had decreed that the best education a youngster could receive was back-breaking labour alongside peasants.

In the early 1970s, the farm employed more than 20,000 people to produce modest quantities of rice and cabbage. “Everyone eventually went back to the city, except the stupid ones and me,” says the 52-year-old Mr Yan, a chain-smoker who coughs when he chuckles at his own jokes.

The last laugh could be with Mr Yan, however. He is now deputy manager of an agricultural business that operates the very same farm. Instead of cabbage and rice, he is producing premium organic pork to be sold at Carrefour and Wal-Mart.

Mr Yan's company is part of a quiet revolution beginning to spread through Chinese agriculture as farmers try to meet the needs of rapidly expanding supermarket chains. Farms that only a decade ago were merely subsisting are now slowly coming under the influence of agribusiness companies. “Agribusiness is in its infancy at the moment in China but it is going to be one of the big phenomena of the next 10 years,” says Jonathan Anderson, Asia economist at UBS. “It is a good time to buy into a pig farm if you can.”

China has had a huge impact on companies such as Wal-Mart, which every year sources more than $10bn (£5.1bn, �.5bn) of goods from the country. But Wal-Mart and other modern retailers are also creating a lasting impression on China, even down on the farm.

The expansion of industrial agriculture has been seen all over the developing world over the last two decades – from the savannahs of central Brazil to Egypt's Nile delta. But it is particularly sensitive in China because of its potential impact on two of the most important political issues. The government of President Hu Jintao has pledged to lift farm incomes and reduce the gap that has opened up between the standard of living in rural areas – where 900m of China's 1.3bn people still live – and the booming coastal cities. Making farms more efficient is central to any long-term effort to reduce poverty.

Greater efficiency can partly be achieved through using the sort of machinery and technology that agribusiness brings. But to boost productivity significantly, farms in China will have to become much bigger and directly employ fewer people.

As a result, the introduction of industrial agriculture raises difficult questions about the status of land ownership in rural China. This has become an explosive issue in recent years as property has been seized to make way for factories and apartments. If farmers are bullied off their land to make way for larger operations, the advance of agribusiness could add to already simmering social tensions and accelerate migration to the fast-growing cities.

The dilemma goes back to the early days of economic reform in China in the late 1970s. One of Deng Xiaoping's first decisions was to break up the system of communal farms and distribute land on an equal basis to rural families. Residents did not gain ownership of the land but typically received a 30-year lease from their village.

The initial results were spectacular. Not only did farm incomes rise quickly but China avoided some of the problems of landless rural workers that have afflicted many developing countries undergoing industrialisation. However, the new land system also had considerable limitations. It left China with millions of tiny, inefficient producers – there are around 200m household farms with an average size of 1.5 acres, which cannot be sold. While incomes in the coastal cities soared in the 1990s, rural incomes rose much more slowly, in part because of the low output per worker on Chinese farms.

This creaking rural system stands in contrast to China's fast-growing modern retail network. Supermarkets and hypermarkets are multiplying rapidly as new middle-class consumers look for higher-quality food and more comfortable surroundings. There are now 16,000 supermarkets and hypermarkets, including both foreign and domestic operators, as well as large restaurant chains – KFC has around 2,000 outlets in China and McDonald's some 800.

Yet supermarkets and restaurant chains have very different requirements from traditional markets. They want specific products, they want quality guarantees and they want to be able to trace the source of the food.

These retailers have had to adapt to circumstances. One of the most dramatic examples is the supply chain that McDonald's has put in place for French fries with the help of Simplot, the private US company that is its main supplier of potatoes. Simplot has an operation in China that can churn out 1bn fries a year to the same quality as the US. The potatoes are mostly grown in Inner Mongolia, a region on the same latitude as Idaho and with a climate similar. But it has been a nearly two decade-long struggle.

According to Dan Cushing, the company's general manager in China, when Simplot arrived in the country in 1988 many potato farms still used a horse and plough. A farm needs around 250 acres to justify investment in tractors and fertiliser machinery, he says, but those in China at the time often had less than one acre. “Just to get a piece of land evened out so that water did not accumulate was a huge exercise in China,” says Mr Cushing. “That sort of thing you can get done on a US farm by one phone call.”

Many farmers were bemused when Simplot proposed a long-term growing cycle that produces commercial potatoes only at the end of the third calendar year. “We had to change the mentality from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture,” says Mr Cushing, who admits that the business was lossmaking for a number of years.

Simplot started by selecting potential candidates, giving them advice on how to grow potatoes to its specifications and trying to convince them of the benefits of long-term supply contracts. Some pulled out, others prospered.

Crucially for Simplot, the effective size of the farms has grown larger. A decade ago the company was dealing with 1,000 potato suppliers: now it does business with just 100. Many are private groups that have leased land from other small farmers, while some are large-scale farms that remained under state control after land reform. “To be successful, you do need some sort of scale,” says Mr Cushing.

Supermarkets now rarely deal directly with small farmers. Instead, over the past five years, a new generation of companies has emerged to supply them with food. Some of these producers, such as Chaoda, a vegetable producer that operates farms in 29 different parts of the country, have managed to lease large enough tracts of land to justify big investments.

Aisen, which runs the organic pork farm outside Shanghai, is another such business. It has been operating this stretch of land in the Nanhui district of the city for five years and now has 12 different pig farms.

To qualify as organic, the pigs are given no antibiotics in the last few months of life and receive a diet free of animal fat. There cannot be more than 2cm of fat on a piece of meat, 25 per cent less than conventional pork cuts in Chinese supermarkets. “In the big cities, customers now want to know that the meat is safe and that it is not too fatty,” says Mr Yan.

Chinese agribusinesses are also beginning to carve out an export sector, especially in labour-intensive crops such as fruit and vegetables. Exports of these have doubled over the past decade and the country is a big supplier of apple juice and garlic. Anyone tucking into the Asian salad served at McDonald's in the US will be eating snow peas produced in China.

Agribusiness may have grown quickly but it has only begun to nibble at the edges of China's vast farming base. One of the few pieces of academic research on the subject looked at 200 communities in the greater Beijing area last year and found that the farmers had been only marginally affected by the creation of supply chains for the city's supermarkets. “It is happening a little, but so far it is not a huge story,” says Scott Rozelle, a Stanford academic and one of the authors of the report.

Some researchers are optimistic that modern retailing will increase productivity by creating the conditions for the consolidation of farms and greater investment in equipment, which they hope will lead to higher rural incomes. “There are more and more opportunities for larger-scale farms to develop,” says Hu Dinghuan, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. “Supermarkets are going to be the driving force for agriculture in China. They are going to have a huge impact on farms.”

Yet there are also concerns about the impact agribusiness will have on rural life in China, with its patchwork of tiny farms. Experts believe that farms will have to become bigger for yields to rise, yet given the ambiguous property rights in rural China, the introduction of agribusiness could open the way to further abuses of small farmers that might aggravate rural poverty and social tensions.

Farmers are not allowed to buy or sell land and, although in theory they can lease their property, many titles have never been formalised. There is huge scope in the system for local officials to make arbitrary decisions that change the terms of land use without providing adequate compensation.

Indeed, land disputes have been one of the most controversial issues in recent years and the cause of many of the thousands of violent protests that have broken out all across the country. According to the Land Ministry in Beijing, there were more than a million illegal seizures between 1998 and 2005, usually for factories or apartment buildings, and the farmers often received little or no compensation.

So far, researchers say, there have been few cases of farmers being pushed off their land to make way for commercial agriculture and larger farms. But Li Xiande, another CAAS professor, says agribusiness groups are increasingly negotiating supply contracts with the village officials who control the use of the land, rather than with the farmers themselves. “It could become a serious issue if the officials do a deal and the farmers only get a small part of the compensation,” he says.

The controversy over land rights came to a head last month when a new property rights bill was approved by the National People's Congress in Beijing. The law has been hugely divisive: proponents think it an important step towards strengthening capitalism, while leftwing critics claim it will validate the illegal land grabs of recent years. Yet the law does not change the situation for rural land ownership and legal experts say it will not give farmers much more protection against unscrupulous officials.

Another level of protection could come from farmers establishing more co-operatives, which would allow them to negotiate collectively with buyers and organise larger-scale production. However, although farming co-ops are permitted, only 7 per cent of villages have created one, according to Mr Rozelle at Stanford. “In reality, the Communist party is not so keen on other groups organising themselves.”

Tens of thousands of farmers have been elbowed off their land in recent years to make way for the country's manufacturing boom, creating a dangerous well of resentment that China's top leaders have pledged to address. The introduction of agribusiness to rural China is a test of whether Beijing really can look after the small farmer.

中 国 农 业 再 次 “合 作 化” ？

 
作者：英国《金融时报》杰夫•代尔(Geoff Dyer)
2007年4月24日 星期二
 
 
19岁时，严海春被下放到荒凉的上海郊区，在一个集体农场中劳动。当时中国正进行文化大革命，毛**发布最高指示：“知识青年到农村去，接受贫下中农的再教育，很有必要”。

上世纪70年代初，严海春所在的农场雇用了2万多人，生产数量不大的稻米和卷心菜。现年52岁的严海春说：“最后每个人都回城了，除了一些傻瓜和我。”这位老烟枪被自己的笑话逗得咯咯发笑，咳嗽了起来。

供应大卖场

然而，笑到最后的可能是严海春。现在他是一家农产品加工企业的副总经理，这家企业经营的正是他文革期间所在的农场。这家农场现在生产的已不是卷心菜和稻米，而是向家乐福(Carrefour)和沃尔玛(Wal-Mart)供应的优质有机猪肉。

中国农民正试图满足迅速扩张的连锁超市的需求，在此过程中，一场静悄悄的革命正席卷中国农业，严海春所在的企业也置身其中。农业生产在10年前还以维持生计为目的，如今已慢慢受到农产品加工企业的影响。瑞银集团(UBS)经济学家乔纳森•安德森(Jonathan Anderson)表示：“目前中国的农产品加工企业还处于初生阶段，但未来10年，它将成为一个亮点。如果有能力的话，现在最好买进一家养猪厂。”

中国对沃尔玛等企业产生了巨大影响——如今沃尔玛每年从中国采购的货物价值逾100亿美元。但沃尔玛等现代零售企业也对中国产生了持久的影响，甚至包括处于产业链低端的农民。

产业化农业席卷所有发展中国家

过去20年，从巴西中部的大草原，到埃及的尼罗河三角洲，产业化农业的发展席卷了所有发展中国家。但农业产业化在中国尤其敏感，因为它对中国最重要的两个政治问题之一具有潜在影响。胡锦涛领导下的中国政府已经承诺，提高农民收入，并缩小农村地区与沿海繁荣城市之间的巨大生活水平差距。目前中国13亿人口中，仍有9亿人居住在农村。对于任何旨在减少贫困的长期措施而言，提高农业的生产效率都至关重要。

利用农产品加工企业的机器和技术，是提高农场生产效率的途径之一。但若想大幅提高生产率，中国的农户生产形式需要扩大规模，并减少直接雇员人数。

农业产业化的推行，使中国农村土地所有权难题浮出水面。近年来，由于地方政府大规模征用土地，为工厂和住宅让路，土地所有权已成为一个爆炸性问题。如果农民被迫出让土地，给规模更大的企业让路，那么农产品加工企业的发展将加剧社会紧张，并加快农民向快速发展的城市迁移。

早在上世纪70年代末中国经济改革的初期，这种两难局面便已出现。邓**最初采取的改革措施之一，便是打破农场集体所有制，将土地平均分配给农户。农民并不拥有土地所有权，但一般都享有30年的租赁使用权。

这一举措的初期效果十分明显。不仅农民收入快速增加，还避免了困扰许多工业化进程中的发展中国家无地农民工的问题。然而，这种新土地制度也有相当大的局限性。它使中国出现了数以百万计的小规模、低效率的农业生产者——全国约有2亿农户，平均耕地只有1.5英亩（而且不可出售）。在上世纪90年代中国沿海城市居民收入飞速增长的同时，农民收入增速要缓慢得多，部分原因在于中国农业生产的人均产出较低。

与现代零售网络形成反差

这种陈旧的农村体制与中国快速成长的现代零售网络形成了鲜明反差。随着新一代中产阶级消费者寻求更高质量的食物和更加舒适的购物环境，中国的超市和大卖场数量正在快速增加。目前，中国有1.6万家中外资超市和大卖场，还有许多大型餐饮连锁企业——肯德基(KFC)在中国大约有2000家门店，麦当劳(McDonald)有800家左右。

然而，超市和餐饮连锁企业与传统农贸市场的要求大不相同。它们需要特定的产品，需要可靠的质量，还希望能够追踪食品的来源。

这些零售企业不得不因地制宜。一个最鲜明的例子就是，肯德基在美国私人公司辛普劳(Simplot)的帮助下为餐厅里的炸薯条建立了一条供应链。作为肯德基的主要土豆供应商，辛普劳在中国设有工厂，每年能够生产1亿份与美国相同品质的冷冻薯条。这些土豆基本上都产自中国内蒙古，该地区与美国爱达荷州处于同一纬度，气候条件也相似。但这是近20年努力的成果。

据辛普劳中国区总经理丹•库欣(Dan Cushing)称，当辛普劳1988年进入中国时，许多种植土豆的农户仍在用马和犁耕地。他表示，只有农场面积达到250英亩，才值得投资购置拖拉机和肥料播撒机器，但当时中国农户的种植面积往往还不足一英亩。“当时，即使想把一块地弄平整以疏导水流，那也是一个浩大的工程。这种事你在美国农场打个电话就能搞定了。”

从‘自给农业'到‘商业性农业'

当辛普劳提出一个较长周期的种植安排时，许多农户都感到困惑，因为根据这种安排，农户们要到第三年年底才能种出商品土豆。库欣表示：“我们必须使农民的思维从‘自给农业'向‘商业性农业'转变。”他承认，辛普劳进入中国后亏损了许多年。

辛普劳最初的做法是，挑出有潜质的农户，指导他们按照要求种植土豆，并尽力让他们相信长期供应合同的好处。一些农户退出了，其余的则发财了。

对辛普劳而言，至关重要的一点在于农场的实际规模扩大了。10年前，该公司和1000个土豆供应商打交道，现在它只需要和100个做生意。这些供应商中很多都是私人集团，它们从其它小规模的农户手中租赁土地；也有一些是土地改革之后仍由国家控制的大规模农场。库欣表示：“要想成功，你必须要有一定的规模。”

超市现在很少和小规模的农户直接打交道。相反，过去五年间，已经出现了一批专为它们供应食品的新公司。像超大现代农业集团(Chaoda)这样的生产商，已租赁了足以进行巨额投资的大片土地。超大是一家蔬菜生产集团，在中国各地29个不同地区拥有农场。

爱森肉食(Aisen)是另一家这样的公司。该公司在上海郊区南汇的一大块土地上兴办了有机猪肉农场，已有五年历史的爱森肉食目前有12家养猪场。

按照有机猪肉的要求，这些猪在出栏前最后几个月必须停用抗生素，同时饲料中不得含有动物脂肪。最后上市的肉块中不能有超过2厘米厚的肥肉，较中国超市里的常见肉块要少25%的脂肪。严海春表示：“如今在大城市，消费者想知道肉是安全的，并且不太肥。”

农产品加工成出口行业

中国的农产品加工企业正开始发展成一个出口行业，尤其是在水果和蔬菜等劳动密集型作物方面。过去十年中，这些产品的出口量已经翻番，中国已经成为苹果汁和大蒜的供应大国。在美国的麦当劳餐厅，每一位品尝亚洲色拉的顾客都会吃到中国产的豌豆。

农产品加工企业或许已经迅猛发展，但它仅仅刚开始触及中国庞大农业基础的边缘。在为数不多的这方面的学术调查中，去年一项针对北京地区200个乡镇的学术调查发现，为城市超市建立的供应链仅对农民产生了微小的影响。斯坦福大学学者、调查报告作者之一的斯考特•罗兹勒(Scott Rozelle)表示：“(供应链)的确产生了影响，但到目前为止影响还不大。”

一些研究人员乐观地认为，现代零售业将为农业整合和提高设备投资规模创造相应条件，从而提高农业生产率。他们希望这将提高农村收入水平。中国农业科学院(CAAS)的胡定寰表示：“发展大规模农业的机会越来越多了。超市将成为中国农业发展的推动力量。它们将对农户产生巨大影响。”

然而，由于中国农地多数都分成小块，对于农产品加工企业给农村生活带来的影响，人们心存疑虑。专家认为，要想提高收入，农民必须扩大生产规模，但由于中国农村产权不明确，引入农产品加工企业可能导致对小农户权益的进一步侵害，从而加剧农村贫困和社会紧张。

中国农民无权买卖土地，虽然理论上他们拥有土地租赁权，但很多权益从未在正式法律条文中明确。对地方官员来说，他们有巨大的空间进行任意决策，改变土地使用的条件，而无须提供足够的补偿。

事实上，土地纠纷已成为中国近年来最具争议的问题，全国各地发生的成千上万起骚乱事件中，很多都起源于土地问题。来自中国国土资源部的资料显示，1998年到2005年间，全国共出现了100多万起非法占用耕地案件。在这些案件中，通常都是为建设工厂和住房而占地，农民们得到的补偿很少，甚至完全没有。

研究人员表示，截至目前，几乎未发生将农民从土地上赶走、为商业性农产品加工企业和更大规模农场让位的案例。但中国农科院的另一位教授李先德表示，农产品加工企业正越来越多地与控制土地使用的村级官员谈判供应合同，而不是与农民直接谈判。他说：“如果官员们达成交易，而农民仅得到小部分补偿，那可能会酿成严重问题。”

上月，中国全国人大通过了《物权法》，围绕土地产权的争议成为媒体的头条。这部法律曾引起极大的分歧：赞成者认为，这是强化资本主义的重要步骤；但左倾批评人士则称，它将使近年的非法征地合法化。但该法律并未改变农村土地所有权的现状。法律专家表示，面对肆无忌惮的地方官员，农民并不能从这部法律中得到多得多的保护。

如果农民组建更多的合作组织，可能会获得另一个层面上的保护，因为这可以使他们集体和买家谈判，组织更大规模的生产。但斯坦福大学的罗兹勒表示，虽然法律允许设立农业合作组织，但采取这种做法的村庄仅有7%。“事实上，共**并不热心于成立其它有组织的团体。”

近年来，数以万计的农民被赶出土地，为中国的制造业热潮让路，酿成了一个危险的不满情绪源泉。中国最高领导层已承诺解决这个问题。农产品加工企业的兴起，将考验中国政府是否真能照顾普通农民的权益。

需要法制社會!