UN Special Rapporteur on Right to Food Says China Must Maintain Small Farms

Bigger farms, more machinery, and more pesticides should mean more food produced, right?

Not necessarily.

Olivier de Schutter is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

He just completed a ten-day mission to China look into the situation of the right to food in the country.

In an exclusive interview with CRI reporter Allie Johnson, de Schutter expressed one of his most surprising findings.

China's tradition of small farms may be its best protection against modern threats to food supplies.

Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, says that when it comes to food production, China is standing on its own two feet.

"It is feeding itself instead of depending on the unpredictable international markets like many other countries do.

And the country hasn't done this through big industrial farms.

On the contrary, de Schutter says China's success has come from maintaining its agricultural traditions.

"One of the most impressive achievements of China is that small scale farming has proven it is capable of feeding this huge population of 1.3 billion."

De Schutter says 200 million households in China farm plots of on average 0.65 hectares. Yet, he says, they are highly productive.

de Schutter commends another key aspect of China's traditional farming: intercropping.

This means diverse crops are planted side by side instead of as a monoculture.

Recent tests in Yunnan province show that rice that being planted alongside other crops requires very little pesticide input.

Their findings could be a model for other places.

"This is one way first to make it less expensive to produce rice, and also to increase the yields quite significantly. In the area where this has been tested the yields have increased by 89 per cent."

All this may seem counter-intuitive. Shouldn't bigger farms mean more food, faster? Well, de Schutter says, not if you're thinking long-term. Large industrial farms need a lot of fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, and large machinery. In the future, those resources will simply not be available.

"And so we have to plan the transition to more sustainable types of farming."

He also warns against the single biggest danger facing agriculture: climate change.

Extreme weather-related events like droughts and floods will make it very difficult for farmers to plan production. He says that planting diverse crops protects farmers against losing everything in a disaster.

"And this is something small farms are much better at achieving–more diverse types of farming–instead of large monocultures which are generally much more fragile in the face of weather-related events."

de Schutter says small farms in China are productive because small scale agriculture has been a government priority for

years. But today, family farms face a new threat: urbanization.

"The danger I see is that pressure on land is increasing, that developers pressure farmers to abandon their land for the development of urbanization and industrial projects, and that pressure on land means that an increasingly large number of farmers shall leave their farms for the cities. And I think this is a trend which has to be very carefully monitored."

de Schutter is concerned that China may begin prioritizing industrial agriculture over small family farms.

"And I do not think that this is a path which is sustainable and desirable."

De Schutter does not deny that small farms are very labour intensive. But, he says, it's worth it.

"If well organized and well supported, small scale farming can be very effective in feeding the population."

De Schutter says that current government support for farmers and farmers' cooperatives should be continued and increased. He also recommends that rural counties are supported to better provide basic services like health care and education. This will encourage people to stay on the farm instead of leaving for the cities.

For CRI, I'm Allie Johnson.