Closing the door on Cooperatives: Analyzing the Failure of Farmers’ Professional Cooperatives as a Viable Development Model in Rural China

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

Abstract

Proponents – scholars, practitioners and policy makers – of farmers’ professional cooperative (FPC) argue that FPCs provide a ‘third road’— between smallholding household farming and large-scale capitalistic farming – in China’s agrarian transition. The central government has provided political and financial support for the growth of FPC, and many studies have documented its rapid growth and positive impact on both farmers’ incomes and agricultural production. All these studies of FPCs, however, are based on either a few cases or questionnaire surveys. For this study, we collected in-depth data of about 30 FPCs spread across the country to gain a comprehensive and longitudinal understanding of the formation, operation, and evolution of these FPCs. We argue that, in the concrete social-historical context of rural China today, the FPC is an inherently flawed model and, aside from a few exceptional cases, most FPCs have failed to deliver the expected benefits to farmers or local economy. Four obstacles prevent FPCs in China to become truly cooperative or even operable: social differentiation and lack of trust, elite capture, tendency of commercialization, and policy mismatch. A policy shift at the central level appears to be already underway, and we predict that FPCs will be replaced – in practice at least, if not legally – by scaled-up, entrepreneurial family farms (jiating nongchang).

Authors

• Zhanping Hu, Singapore Management University

• Qian Forrest Zhang, Singapore Management University