The "one family, two systems" in agricultural products reflects a lack of oversight
Some media outlets exposed that farmers in parts of Weifang, Shandong, use the highly toxic pesticide "Shennongdan" to grow ginger, and the ginger farmers say "crops grown with excessive pesticides are not eaten by ourselves and not sent for export; all of them are only supplied for domestic sale." In fact, this "one family, two systems" phenomenon in the supply of agricultural products is not an isolated case, and it is showing an increasingly widespread trend, existing extensively in every link of agricultural production and processing. Why does this chaos arise, and how can it be eliminated?
The emergence of the "one family, two systems" phenomenon in the supply of agricultural products is caused by a series of reasons, and there are loopholes in every link from the field to the dining table.
From the production level, blindly applying excessive chemical fertilizer in pursuit of yield leads into the strange cycle of American-style chemical agriculture. From the perspective of planting habits, if the same type of crop is planted in the same plot for a long time, after several rounds of planting it easily leads to outbreaks of pests and diseases; this is in fact the general law of population rise and fall in nature. In order to increase yield, farmers blindly apply excessive chemical fertilizer, causing soil acidification, and the acidic environment makes root-knot nematode disease highly prevalent, greatly affecting yield and even leading to total crop failure in severe cases. There are two solutions: first, the American chemical agriculture model, which relies on applying pesticides, but pests and diseases will gradually develop drug resistance during evolution, which in turn leads to the use of even greater quantities of pesticides, trapping farmers in the "chemical agriculture" strange cycle; second, traditional crop rotation or fallowing, which has been used in our country for several thousand years, but unfortunately, in recent years, in the one-sided pursuit of yield and economic benefit, these habits have gradually been abandoned.
From the perspective of the product pricing mechanism, atomized and dispersed small farmers lack bargaining power and can only rely on quantity to win. At present, individual small farmers facing a large market have almost no bargaining power at all. Even if individual dispersed farmers produce agricultural products without pesticides, it is still difficult for them to sell them at a good price, because the quantity they produce is small and they lack organization; in front of the powerful market, the prices of their products can only follow the market, and ultimately they can only rely on simply pursuing quantity to sell a bit more and earn a bit more money. Our country's agricultural product supply chain is too long. Farmers growing vegetables generally sit and wait for intermediaries to come to purchase, the intermediaries take the purchased agricultural products to the producing-area wholesale market for sale, then merchants in the producing-area wholesale market transport them to the selling-area wholesale market, and afterward vendors in the selling-area farmers' market go to the selling-area wholesale market to purchase. With such excessively long links, quality problems are very difficult to monitor effectively. Agricultural products also have a unique blind-spot attribute, namely that it is difficult to distinguish just from appearance whether highly toxic pesticides were used or not, and sometimes agricultural products grown without pesticides instead look worse and cannot fetch a good price.
From the perspective of the market access mechanism, the domestic market is huge and the number of products is enormous, and spot checks in many markets become a mere formality, making it easy to pass. According to media reports, in the toxic ginger incident, ginger farmers claimed that as long as they found a few jin of qualified ginger to submit for testing, they could obtain a test report showing that pesticide residues were up to standard. If entry screening at the market were very strict, farmers could in fact completely produce safe agricultural products without applying pesticides or with less pesticide, such as exported ginger. The main reason is that export screening is very strict; once residues exceed the standard, the losses are very large.
The underground market for highly toxic pesticides remains banned repeatedly yet continues to exist, which also makes it easier for farmers to buy prohibited drugs. Although the competent authorities have repeatedly claimed that there is no problem with the control of highly toxic pesticides, in reality farmers can still relatively easily purchase various highly toxic pesticides on the market. The underground market for highly toxic pesticides has never been effectively governed, and repeatedly appears despite repeated crackdowns. This is related both to our country's rural areas being acquaintance societies with vast land and sparse population, and to lenient punishment, where being caught ends with a fine, so the cost of crime is very low while the profit is very large.
Eliminating the "one family, two systems" phenomenon also requires local governments in each sales area to truly take action. On the one hand, through cooperatives, farmers should be truly organized so as to eliminate the current unreasonable pricing mechanism. Sales-area policies should also implement strict random testing policies, and give a red light to those producing areas where problems repeatedly occur, so that the producing-area governments can be forced to truly take action and exercise their supervisory responsibilities.