Family Farming in China’s Agrarian Change: Being Autonomous or Subsumed by Agro-Capital?

• In Event: Contesting the Future of Chinese Agriculture and Rural Society: Is there Hope on the Horizon for Family Farming?

Abstract

Land transfer in China has been a spontaneous practice in the countryside ever since the de-collectivization in the early 1980s. Land concentration has accelerated since around 2008. The scaling up operation is changing the relations of production in agriculture, not only in the form of direct labor employment. In fact, there are various forms that individual households been subsumed by agro-capital.

This research is based on a case-study of an agribusiness enterprise which has transferred large tracts of farmland in a major rice production county, attempting to reveal how individual households are subsumed by the agribusiness. The enterprise has come to an effective strategy after some failed trials – such as operating the wage labor-based large-scale farm. All its transferred farmland are now out-contracted to the contracted tenant households (CTH), who are supposed to pay land transfer payments to the agribusiness and buy the “agricultural inputs package” (including chemical fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, and agricultural mechanization services) exclusively from the enterprise, and sell their paddy to the enterprise after harvest. The CTHs take the shape of “family farmers”, as they pay for the land and all the agricultural inputs, and operate on their own. But further exploration shows that the benefits the CTHs obtain are just the same as the wage of their labor input. This research will show that these seemingly “autonomous” rural households are virtually in indirect employment relationship with the enterprise, although they are not directly employed in any sense.

Author

• Yiyuan Chen, Chinese Agricultural University