Abstract
Serious farmland scarcities make smallholders a default mode for China’s agriculture, which makes efficient and equitable rural development a great challenge. Tensions lead to alternation between autonomous family farming and coordinated collective agriculture. Rapid urbanization since the 1980s has strongly stimulated flower-growing and agribusiness in Yunnan, China. The organization for commercial flower-farming is, however, an issue. Officially promoted for collective farming, voluntary cooperatives are wrecked by the free-riding problem. Grower associations nevertheless spontaneously emerge, with the flexible entry and exit of members without binding joint-assets and joint-ownership, which is facilitated by technological changes to the transaction. Empirical investigation in Tonghai, Yunnan, unveiled the institution of agribusiness–smallholder partnership for inclusive rural development. Smallholders have actively participated in flower agriculture, which has contributed significantly to the development of rural economies. The high casualty of micro-smallholders suggests that farm size is an important and crucial factor for sustainable farming. Effective rural development has to be supported by endogenous non-agricultural jobs so that farm size can be increased.
Highlights
Academic Editors: Piotr Prus and Marc A
Sustainability 2022, 14, 2614 top-down in order to address the rural spatial and social fragmentation, where rural elites play an important role [4]. This demonstrates that institutions conducive to efficient and equitable rural development are crucial in the setting of severe land scarcity
This paper addresses the question of productive rural development in the context of farmland scarcity, because the consolidation of farmland under collectivism or privatization is not conducive to inclusive rural development that should engage smallholders
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Taking the level of urbanization into consideration, China’s rural population’s farmland per capita is only 9% that of Brazil’s, another developing country (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/theworld-factbook/, accessed on 6 April 2019). Sustainability 2022, 14, 2614 top-down in order to address the rural spatial and social fragmentation, where rural elites play an important role [4] This demonstrates that institutions conducive to efficient and equitable rural development are crucial in the setting of severe land scarcity. We identify the institutions and mechanisms for engaging smallholders in rural development by presenting a case of flower-growing agribusiness in rural Yunnan, an underdeveloped province in China. Smallholder associations and agribusiness firms collaborate based on mutual interests without being bound by contracts, and the agribusiness–smallholder partnership is a helpful institution for inclusive rural development. There was no overall population information available about the numbers of agri-business firms and smallholder farmers in Tonghai; we used the snowball technique for sample selection
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