Producing and Procuring Horticultural Crops with Chinese Characteristics: Why Small Farmers Are Thriving and Supermarkets Are Absent in Rural China
Honglin Wang (),
Xiaoxia Dong,
Jikun Huang,
Scott Rozelle and
Thomas Reardon
No 25762, 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists
Abstract:
The supermarket revolution has arrived in China and is spreading as fast as or faster than anywhere in the world. As the demand for vegetables, fruit, nuts and other high valued products have risen, urban retailers are finding new venues seized on niche and today have over $55 billion in sales, more than a third of the urban food market. However, the experience of many developing countries suggests that there could be serious distributional impacts of the rising of supermarkets. There is concern among policy makers and academics that poor, small farmers might be excluded from market. The main goal of our paper is to understand what types of farmers have been able to participate in the horticultural revolution, how they interact with markets and how supply chains affect their production decisions. Using a unique set of spatially sample communities in the Greater Beijing area, we find small and poor farmers have actively participate in the emergence of China's horticulture economy. Moreover, there has been almost no penetration of modern wholesalers or retailers into rural communities. In the paper we document seven characteristics of China's food economy that we believe account for this unique set of findings.
Keywords: Crop; Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/25762/files/cp061025.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae06:25762
DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.25762
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().