Development Strategy of Organic Agriculture in China: A Case of Rural Urbanization in Xingyi

Summary in the original language of the document

China’s development focus has been on rural development since 2000, as the country tries to upgrade the rural areas’ infrastructure and economy system. Different development methods had been applied with limited sustainability in terms of lifting the income of rural residents, who are primarily farming-based group. In this paper, we will introduce a real case study on an on-going rural urbanization project taking place in rural China, while primarily focusing on how this non-governmental project utilize organic farming to try to shape a possible method to sustainably upgrade the income of the local residents in rural China in the process of a complex rural urbanization development.
Rural urbanization movement has been one of China’s most significant social and economic tasks since 1979, as the majority of China’s population was in rural. In 2013. China’s urban population surpasses rural population for the first time in the past 5,000 years. As urban population continues to grow, rural areas also continue to undergo urbanization process to withstand the excess urban population whom the current urban areas cannot sustain. The growth of urban population generates three key issues that require effective methods of rural urbanization to alleviate. First of all, urban area’s lack of physical space to withstand the increased population coming from rural areas has forced the city to expand to a degree that exceeds its original designed capability to provide an efficient living quality for its residents. Secondly, the lack of suitable career opportunity for the new urban residents that come from the rural areas, as these “new” residents’ professional background mainly surrounds labor-intensive industries such as agriculture and construction- neither has much prospect in earning enough salary for the relative workers to support a reasonable lifestyle in urban areas. Lastly, the unbalanced resources and infrastructure development distribution between rural and urban areas caused rural work force to abandon their rural homes and move to urban area, leaving rural areas with insufficient work force to develop its own industry effectively. One of the main elements of China’s national-level development strategy to rural urbanization is to explore an effective set of rules and regulations to utilize private capital in developing rural areas. A typical rural urbanization development process on the government side involves rural residential land rearrangement and consolidation, real estate development, courting and attracting of business investments, and local economic system development. Each of these development processes requires significant financial input and a long-term strategic development plan in order to allow both the private capital and local development to head into a sustainable better future together. Looking back the past 30 plus years, China has been conducting different experiments on bringing in different development models into rural development, none of them had been proven to be sustainably efficient in terms of benefiting both sides (the participating private companies, investors and rural residents). Rural residential land rearrangement and consolidation and real estate development takes up the biggest portion in terms of monetary investment at the initial stage of a typical rural urbanization project. The main purpose of land rearrangement and consolidation process is to ensure that, after urbanization process is completed, each rural urbanization development does not result in loss of farmland in terms of area, as China has imposed a strict limit in maintaining the size of farmland at 1.8 billion mu (about 1,200,000 square kilometer) nationwide. Due to the fact that each of the local residents has the decision power on determine the cost of each piece of land involving in rearrangement, the budget of completing the rearrangement and consolidation process is growing unpredictably high. As the initial cost of real estate development depends largely on the cost of the land rearrangement, the local residents’ personal willingness in cooperating with the rearrangement process become the first key element in affecting the investment efficiency and the cash flow in a rural urbanization development project.