Organic Local Food Movement Expands in China

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Trends forecaster Gerald Celente predicts that in 2011, one of the biggest entrepreneurial opportunities will be in the organic food movement.

More and more people around the world are beginning to realize that governments are only interested in furthering the multinational corporate interests of companies like Cargill and Monsanto at the expense of public health and safety.

In the U.S., ever since the ’60s when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, chronicling the effects of DDT and other pesticides on the environment, the organic movement has gathered momentum reaching critical mass in the ’90s with various legislation and organic certification standards enacted.

According to John Paull, (2007) China’s Organic Revolution. Journal of Organic Systems, from 2000 to 2006, China moved from 45th to 2nd position in the world in number of hectares under organic management.

China now has more land under organic horticulture than any other country. In the year 2005/2006, China added 12% to the world’s organic area. This accounted for 63% of the world’s annual increase in organic land, and China now has 11% of the world’s organically managed land.

But in spite of China’s movement towards organic farming, a survey released recently by Insight China Magazine and the Tsinghua University Media Survey Lab, indicates almost 70% of China’s consumers feel insecure about food safety.

“Food safety is a serious problem in China, and not all the so-called organic foods in shops are really organic,” says He Pinru, an organic-farmer in southern China’s Guangdong province.

USA TODAY reporter Calum MacLeod, claims a small but growing number of people are starting or joining organic farms that abide by the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model being used in the USA.

Shi Yan, 28, a rural development expert inspired by the CSA model says that interest in safer foods in China has soared since milk powder doctored with the industrial chemical melamine killed six babies and sickened 300,000 in 2008.

MacLeod notes that in November, melamine resurfaced in contaminated dairy drinks in Hunan province despite several government crackdowns since the milk powder scandal in 2008. Chinese companies use melamine in food to artificially construct higher protein content.

China has about 40 “real” CSA farms, says Yan, who opened Little Donkey Farm in Beijing’s semi-rural suburbs in 2009, where members pay to work their own plot of land and 500 members pay a $600 annual fee for a weekly supply of vegetables grown without the chemical fertilizers and pesticides used on most Chinese farms.

A growing number of Chinese companies have started their own farms. He Pinru’s members include state-owned telecommunications and power companies, and real estate developers, who want to offer safe, good-quality food at employee canteens, he says.

Fang Ming, manager of an organic farm near Shanghai has 27 companies, mostly state-owned, up from 60 at its launch two years ago. “I found companies buy our food due to poor food safety in China, as there are too many fertilizers used on vegetables and too many food additives,” he says. “They also want to offer green, organic food as a way to unite employees.”

In China, food-safety activists who who alert officials to food problems are simply arrested. “Zhao Lianhai, the father of a boy sickened by tainted milk powder, was jailed and later paroled in December for his activism on behalf of other parents”.

“I’m nervous sometimes and very careful about what I do,” says Beijing lawyer Sang Liwei, who took part in drafting the food-safety law. He says he avoids cases with multiple plaintiffs because the government is sensitive about large disputes.

Even as the Chinese government arrests activists who protest against the chemicals and toxins found in food grown on unregulated, factory farms, government agencies privately grow their own food for their staffs.

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