Soil as a site of struggle: differentiated rifts under different modes of farming in intensive commercial agriculture in urbanizing China

ABSTRACT

The metabolic rifts resulted from the rural urban divide and agricultural commodification require remedy with synthetic fertilizers, multiple labour practices and other methods of repair in urbanizing China. The case study in North China shows that the metabolic rift unfolds in an uneven way in different farmer groups with differential labour patterns and livelihood strategies. Simple commodity producers have generally greater potential than capitalized family farmers to ameliorate soil by internalizing external squeeze. This implies contradictory processes and a complex dialectic of destruction and replenishment which makes soil a site of struggle and metabolic rift an increasingly ambivalent notion. This contradiction between intensive ‘modern agriculture’ and its complex material base will ultimately limit the sustainable development of agriculture, which requires a fundamental change of the productivist paradigm and a return to ecological principles.

KEYWORDS:

• metabolic rift
• metabolic repair
• soil fertility
• sustainable agriculture

Acknowledgements

We thank Philip McMichael and John Zinda of Cornell University and Barbara Harriss-White of Oxford University for their generous and constructive suggestions on the draft. We are also deeply grateful to the local officials and residents in the study locales who shared their time and experiences with us. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback on our paper. The authors are solely responsible for any errors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This is a pseudonym.

2 1 mu = 1/15 ha.

3 It was reported by local farmers that three government-built greenhouses (each with a cultivation area of 0.9∼1 mu) represented the maximum farming scale for family labour (without wage labour).

4 There were also several entrepreneurial farmers in neighbouring villages who accumulated capital from non-agricultural activities and invested in greenhouse production. They rely completely on hired labour for production and integrate commodity relations into all areas of reproduction (including labour and land).

5 Yuan is the Chinese currency, 1US$=6.5 yuan (approximately, varies by time).

6 There are different kinds of organic fertilizers, e.g. made of agricultural wastes or industrial wastes.

7 It is reported that the rapidly growing waste sector of many economies (Hoornweg, Bhada-Tata, and Kennedy 2013) indicates the inexorably widening metabolic rift.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council [grant number: CSC201706350152].

Notes on contributors

Huijiao Xu

Huijiao Xu is a visiting scholar at Cornell University in 2018–2020, and a PhD candidate at the College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD), China Agricultural University. Her research interests include Chinese agrarian transition, land politics, food systems and sociology of agriculture.

Jingzhong Ye

Jingzhong Ye is a professor of development studies and Dean at the College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD), China Agricultural University. His research interests include development intervention and rural transformation, rural ‘left behind’ populations, rural education, land politics and sociology of agriculture.