Sunday, October 12, 2008

China's Market-based Agriculture?

Interesting in at least two senses: 1) the move towards reforming one of the oldest central pieces of the Chinese communist state-planned economy; and 2) an apparent drive towards industrialized agriculture, which, in the case of the US has been ravaging to small rural communities and ultimately also food prices.
Chinese leaders are expected to allow peasants to buy or sell land-use rights for the first time, a step that could draw hundreds of millions of farmers more firmly into the city-centered market economy.

The new policy, which is being discussed this weekend by Communist Party leaders and could be announced within days, would be the biggest economic reform in many years and would mark another significant departure from the system of collective ownership and state control that China built after the 1949 revolution.

1 comment:

troutsky said...

The sheer pace of development is stunning, like watching a film in fast forward! I can't imagine it is sustainable but I don't know enough.Liu Shih-Diiing writes of Macau:"Such mobilizations are evidence of a new oppositional culture arising amid these rapid social changes." NLR