In China, Farming Advances Lie Fallow

No Clear Path for New Science or Policy Changes to Reach Rural Fields

(Ariana Eunjung Cha - Twp)

ZENGCHENG, China -- China's vast network of food research centers and laboratories churns out mountains of papers on the latest farming techniques and technology. Their work on chemical use, pollution risks and genetically engineered crops is considered to be among the most advanced in the world. The Ministry of Agriculture keeps close tabs on the developments, constantly issuing new advice and new regulations based on the research.

None of that information reaches Li Xiujuan.

With her husband and two children, Li tends to a 2 1/2 -acre farm in Guangdong province, on the southern coast, where many of the fruits and vegetables sent to the United States are grown. In recent months, Guangdong has been the source of pesticide- or additive-laced shipments of plums, lemons, star fruit, kumquats, scallions and ginseng blocked by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The answer to why even the most well-intentioned and smartest policies of China's leaders have been so difficult to implement in a country so vast lies in small farmers like Li. With 200 million farming households and 500,000 food-producing companies, information about new science often doesn't trickle out to remote areas for months or years -- if ever.

The way Li farms is mostly passed down from her parents and grandparents, she says. Her only other source of information is the pesticide salesmen. In the eight years she has been here, they are the only ones who have come to teach her anything new.

So whenever insects descend on the melon fields and cornfields, Li stirs up some pesticide cocktails and sprays. The label says to use it every 15 days. But if the pests are especially resilient, she doesn't hesitate to reapply it in a week. Doing otherwise would endanger the roughly $1,300 that she is struggling to earn this year. Li, 32, said she doesn't understand much about the chemicals except that "they are very strong. They kill everything."

As in the rest of the country, Guangdong's countryside is carved into farms as small as a fifth of an acre, the legacy of Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the late 1970s that aimed to get rid of communal farms and redistribute land equally among families.

With concern mounting over the safety of its exports, Beijing in recent weeks has promised to reform its farming, processing and monitoring systems. But many of the workers like Li who handle food remain unaware that a problem exists.

As the country has grown, the government is losing control over how the latest scientific ideas are communicated and applied in the countryside. There poverty is still widespread in contrast with the growing wealth of urban China, and there have been tens of thousands of violent protests in recent years.

Zhao Zhijun, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said there is a gap between the government's push to develop the science and technology of agriculture and how farmers practice it.

"Research projects are set up by the state or by the scientists without effective communications with the farmers," Zhao said. Furthermore, because scientists aren't judged on real-world results, "they are more interested in the foresightedness and theoretical creativeness of a project and ignore practicality."

In the 1980s, the government pushed the use of chemicals to increase food output. Now, in light of research on the dangers of pesticides, the state has been trying to break farmers of their dependence on them, but banned pesticides still regularly show up in rivers and lakes. China's statistics show that more than 10 percent of cropland may have been polluted because of improper use of pesticides and fertilizers. And while the situation is improving, each year there are still thousands victims of pesticide-laden food, such as a couple in a small village in Shandong province who died after eating leeks with heavy doses of a pesticide.