Agricultural industrialization should leave room for smallholder farmers to develop

Given the situation of many people and little land, a huge rural population, and urban absorption capacity that remains to be seen, we need to once again recognize the wisdom and contributions of the hundreds of millions of smallholders who sustain China's social stability in agricultural production, and in the process of agricultural modernization and industrialization, ensure the interests of the broad masses of smallholders and safeguard the stability of rural society.

The smallholder model can create more jobs

In his recent book “The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization,” Dutch rural sociologist Jan Douwe van der Ploeg offers an in-depth discussion of the following characteristics of and differences between peasant agriculture and corporate agriculture.

⟦NL> Previous theories of the peasantry often regarded smallholders as “an obstacle to development,” a barrier on the industrializing “road out of backwardness,” and a social form that should disappear or be actively removed. What should replace it is the well-equipped “agricultural entrepreneur” who complies with market logic. Because smallholders cannot cross the “technological ceiling” implied by their resource use, the backward smallholder mode of production is equated with poverty. Van der Ploeg points out, however, that these theories of the peasantry contain many misunderstandings. They emphasize only the intervention and participation of smallholders as a given element in agriculture, but hardly touch on how smallholders participate.

In fact, the way smallholders organize agricultural development determines that their incomes will remain at an acceptable level, or may even rise. The household contract responsibility system in rural China that began in the early 1980s is a typical smallholder agricultural model. It involves the agency of the actors' own strength, emphasizing the enthusiasm and spirit of contribution in working with nature, and the value and sense of satisfaction produced by relatively independent craftsmanship. Labor becomes the key factor, placed at the center of the stage, linking labor with resources that are self-controlled and partly self-allocated, and also linking it with prospects and the future. The centrality of labor is closely tied to employment, and the smallholder agricultural model can create more jobs than other agricultural models.

What smallholders rely on is the co-production of humans and nature, full of respect for the environment and for life. Nature is used to create and strengthen a resource pool, which is replenished through labor, knowledge, networks, market access, and so on. Careful planning of the agricultural production seasons reflects the high efficiency of household division of labor and cooperation. Moreover, diversity has been included in the concept of smallholder agriculture from the very beginning. Since the 1990s, the field of rural development practice in Europe has already shown the multifunctionality of agriculture, greatly increasing the added value that smallholder agriculture can create. But it should be pointed out that just as European agriculture was shifting from specialization to multifunctionality, China's agriculture was shifting from a long history of multifunctionality to specialization.

Corporate agriculture involves many phenomena of exclusion and dispossession

When capital no longer has more room for profit in the cities, what it truly values is the vast profit space in rural areas and agriculture, often disregarding the hundreds of millions of rural smallholders.

In these agricultural companies, capital mostly comes from outside the countryside, and its purpose is simply to make profit. Their activities in agriculture are often divorced from existing ecological capital, focusing on gradually reducing the role of nature, because nature makes the labor process impossible to standardize and thus becomes an obstacle to the accelerated expansion of production scale. Driven by high technology, the parts that remain are constantly undergoing all-around “reconstruction” through a process of “artificialization,” already beyond traditional imagination.

The production goal of corporate agriculture is concentrated on the creation of profit (surplus value), and it relies only on currently available resources to produce added value. The market here has become a principle of organization, and agricultural production has no choice but to follow the “logic of the market,” with entrepreneurship becoming the core mechanism for adjusting the social and natural factors inside and outside agricultural enterprises. Under the guidance of this goal of single-mindedly pursuing profit, when market prices fall so severely that profit becomes a bubble, capital will choose to exit and move to other industries, disregarding a country's food security.

Corporate agriculture organizes and arranges labor and the production process according to market relations and their prospects, with external indicators becoming the main standards of instruction, such as determining rations based on milk prices and the costs of different feed ingredients, rather than based on the growth process and daily performance of a cow. Corporate agriculture's indifference to biological life and its treatment of agricultural objects as disposable products make the animals being raised more vulnerable, forming a sharp contrast with the “careful tending” of smallholder agriculture.

In corporate agriculture, profit and income levels can be raised by reducing labor input, and thus increase as labor flows out. They will not strive to create more jobs, and smallholders are destined to be superfluous. Corporate agriculture also involves more phenomena of exclusion and dispossession, such as from land to water resources, from human resources to policy and funding support.

Keep the green mountains and clear waters, and remember the nostalgia

Agriculture cannot be reduced to food supply. Agriculture represents an important link between society and nature, and it is always integrated with nature, society, and the emotions, interests, and prospects of those who personally work the land. As Bauman points out, the continuity of life is the essence of agriculture. Yet the current trend in agricultural development is often one of desocialization and dehumanization, reducing social relations to purely material and monetary transactions. In recent years, under the pretext of adjusting the industrial structure, a wave of forced large-scale specialization and monoculture has spread across the country. Many of these measures come from the purpose of increasing local tax revenue or corporate profit, and often do not consider the basic principle of putting the livelihood security of smallholder households first. Farmers forced to grow other cash crops must now buy commercial grain, increasing their livelihood risks and making them especially vulnerable when famine comes.

At a time when the central government is paying more attention to a “new countryside for people,” we need to maintain a clear understanding of the “illusion of development” or the “new countryside of things” constructed by capital going to the countryside and corporate agriculture. “Human well-being” should become the ultimate concern of rural development. Such a development model must change the squeezing and seizure of the survival resources of rural areas and farmers, and restore and rebuild the economic, social, and cultural bonds and vitality of the countryside. Facing the heavy reality of rural materialization and commodification, can we leave more space for family bonds in agriculture and rural life with farmers as the main actors?