Sustainable Development in Rural China: Farmer Innovation and Self-Organisation in Marginal Areas. Bin Wu

Abstract

Sustainable Development in Rural China: Farmer Innovation and Self-organisation in Marginal Areas, by Bin Wu. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. xvi + 184 pp. US$114.95/£65.00 (hardcover). rapid increase in productivity and standards of living in China's coastal areas should not make us forget that in the Chinese interior many farmers are still struggling to produce enough to survive. Bin Wu's study of agricultural development in a poor county on the loess plateau, an extension of a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Hull, discusses the organizational difficulties of adopting new and more rewarding farm technologies after the collectives were disbanded. In successive chapters Bin Wu moves from a general discusssion of sustainability in the developing world and marginalization in rural China to the environment and to innovation in rural Shaanxi. He is critical of classical topdown agricultural extension methods that are unresponsive to farmers' needs, that neglect indigenous communication networks and that fail to reach the poor and women. China's rural anti-poverty program is criticized for its lack of proper targeting and for remaining stuck in the towns and the more accessible rural areas within each county: The barrier to China's sustainable development is the marginalization process, whereby scarce resources are concentrated in core areas. As a result, the unstable ecological system in the marginal areas deteriorates (p. 169). He favors micro-level support for marginal hamlets and farms, but fails to recognize that on the loess plateau the potential for obtaining an adequate income from farming and an acceptable level of services in hamlets is very limited. For better or worse, the farming population in the mountainous districts must go through a rural restructuring process that shifts people and investments to industry and to other areas. Useful as the opening chapters may be for those interested in development theory, China specialists will move on quickly to the second half of the book. There Bin Wu presents key arguments about the vital function of farmers' selforganization and social capital in the adoption of agricultural innovations. He illustrates these by way of greenhouse vegetable growing, drinking-water storage systems and cooperative afforestation. In all cases, appropriation of new technology has been strongly related to the organizational dimension: groups that shared technology concentrated their labor and profited from scale benefits. Another common characteristic was the local presence of a strong innovator who convinced villagers to cooperate. lack of such an innovator appeared to be the most serious constraint to innovation. In addition to interviews with farmers and village leaders in Zhidan County (interviews with county and rural township officials are conspicuously absent), the main data for this study are taken from Wu's 1996 survey of agricultural practices and innovation in 150 households in fifty sample hamlets of nine administrative villages in Zhidan. These were selected to represent different degrees of marginality: valley, intermediate and remote areas. number of sampled households in valley areas was too small for valid statistical comparison, and partly for that reason Wu focuses on the latter two categories. They differed in terms of distance to the market and in hamlet size (averaging only 20 and 14 households, respectively), but levels of income and illiteracy (38 per cent) were similar. …