Beyond a bottle of liquid: pesticide dependence in transitional rural China

Abstract

Pesticide dependence is a major threat to food safety and local environment. Although numerous studies have explored different causes of pesticide dependence, few have examined how pesticides are locked into agricultural modernisation and rural transformation. Based on a case study of a Chinese village, this paper demonstrates how agricultural modernisation trajectory and rural changes have perpetuated the use of pesticides as necessities in agriculture as well as for farmers' livelihoods. Modern technologies, such as hybrid rice, conservation tillage, changes in crop structure, and reduction of intercropping all contribute highly towards pesticide dependence. The household responsibility system in China has provided the institutional foundation for increased pesticide use. Rural transformations driven by livelihoods diversification have created conducive social spaces for pesticide application. To step out of pesticide dependence, promotion of genetic diversity in agriculture, a reassessment of locational suitability of conservation tillage, institutional strengthening and the promotion of integrated pest management methods are suggested.

Keywords:

• pesticide dependence
• development process
• agricultural modernisation
• rural transformation
• China

Acknowledgements

We deeply appreciate Professor Ye Jingzhong, Dr Pan Lu, Dr Wu Huifang, and Dr He Congzhi from China Agricultural University for great help in fieldwork and valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. We also thank Professor Geoff Wilson from Plymouth University for his encouragements. We also want to thank Dr Stewart Barr and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments. All errors remain ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Pesticide in the Chinese context is an umbrella name of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and various other substances used to control plant pests and disease.

2. Price scissors in this context signify the increasingly diverging prices gaps between the industrial and agricultural sectors, which is often characterised by disproportionately high industrial prices and low agricultural prices. This process often favours the industrial sector through controlling the price of agricultural product by the state, in order to facilitate industrial accumulation, which is an important strategy for socialist countries (e.g. countries in the former Soviet Union and China) in order to achieve industrialisation at the initial developmental stage (Knight 1995, Lin and Yu 2009).

3. Unbalanced financial system refers to the strategy followed to achieve rapid industrialisation by the Chinese government before the twentieth century when it deliberately prioritised channelling huge amounts of finance to industrial sectors at the expense of agricultural or rural sectors, which has caused severe long-term underinvestment of Chinese agriculture and rural regions (Anderson et al. 2004).

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork in 2009–2010 was funded by Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Social Science Research Council of USA, and China Agricultural University; the fieldwork in 2012 was funded by the Bilateral Doctorate Scholarship from Plymouth University and China Agricultural University.