China, Rights, Land and Milk

China’s government has announced a major new land reform policy. Land-holders, including millions of small-scale farmers, will now be able to access markets where they can swap, lease or exchange land usage rights. Some observers say this will free peasants across China from their hardscrabble lives, and allow them a chance at the economic prosperity that has lifted millions of Chinese out of poverty over the past few decades. Others worry that large-scale, corporate-owned, industrial-scale farms will come to dominate China’s rural regions and with it, vast quantities of land, water and ecological space. “This is huge news,” writes a Brighter Green colleague living in Beijing. “China’s farmers will be allowed to sell their land — most likely to bigger owners…In terms of use of livestock and land, we know that this will lead to highly concentrated uses of land and animals.” Just like those explored in Brighter Green’s recent policy paper on China, Skillful Means.

Other concerns about the impact of the new policy stem from another quarter: the corruption that’s widespread among China’s provincial administration. It may well stymie rural residents’ exercise of their new-found property rights, or lead to pressure on farmers to sell land at low prices or under duress. Another recent story that links China’s industrializing animal agriculture with food safety and public health caught my eye. The Washington Post reports that the growth in China’s dairy industry (examined in Skillful Means) has led to vastly increased advertising for dairy products in China. Some of the advertising targets are new mothers, who are being “persuaded” that feeding formula derived from cow’s milk to their infants is not only more convenient than breastfeeding, it’s more nutritious, too. The marketing has been insistent, and effective. “Even some parents with a PhD believe that milk powder is better than breastfeeding,” Ding Bing, editor of a Chinese pro-breastfeeding newsletter recently told the Washington Post. At least four Chinese infants have died and more than 50,000 have been sickened in recent weeks by cow’s milk formula laced with melamine, a toxic industrial chemical that also happens to add protein bulk to milk and meat products. An unsettling case of supply and demand. So what’s the future of big milk? Got time? Stay tuned.