Price fall means cruel harvest
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Chen Jianquan, 32, a farmer from Qingzhou city, Shandong province, waits in his truck at one of China's largest vegetable wholesale markets in Shouguang. It was Saturday afternoon, and Chen had arrived with a ton of Chinese cabbage at 1 am. Most of it still had not been sold. [China Daily] |
![Chen Jianquan, 32, a farmer from Qingzhou city, Shandong province, waits in his truck at one of China's largest vegetable wholesale markets in Shouguang. It was Saturday afternoon, and Chen had arrived with a ton of Chinese cabbage at 1 am. Most of it still had not been sold. [China Daily]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20110426/0011111fa1560f20664d04.jpg "Chen Jianquan, 32, a farmer from Qingzhou city, Shandong province, waits in his truck at one of China's largest vegetable wholesale markets in Shouguang. It was Saturday afternoon, and Chen had arrived with a ton of Chinese cabbage at 1 am. Most of it still had not been sold. [China Daily]")
Cutting the links
Despite the losses to farmers and dealers such as Xu and Chen, consumers have not yet benefited from the low wholesale prices.
Liu Chang, who lives in Beijing's Chaoyang district, said she had read about cheap vegetables being thrown away like trash. "At the groceries downstairs, I'm still paying 2 yuan per kg for cabbage."
The latest figures from the National Bureau of Statistics, released on Monday, show Chinese cabbage selling in 50 cities for 1.79 yuan per kg April 11-20. The price was 1.75 yuan in the same period last month.
Cheap agricultural products don't equate to cheap food on the dining table because there are many intermediaries between farm and bowl. As the prices of petrol and labor have risen over the past several months, the costs of harvesting, packaging and transporting produce have stayed high. The State Council has repeatedly ordered local governments to reduce the intermediate links for agricultural products.
Xu and other farmers said the threshold for providing goods directly to supermarkets is still too high and complicated for individual farmers like themselves.
Who's responsible?
Li Guoxiang, a researcher with the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that government measures to curb inflation have contributed to the plunge in prices paid to vegetable farmers and that they will affect more agricultural products later this year. For example, when the government limits price increases to consumers, it means that prices paid earlier in the production chain are limited too.
Lin Donghua, a researcher with the Economy Institute of Shandong Academy of Social Sciences, said this year's decrease in cabbage prices follows years of increase. In the past two years, Lin said, the rising price of Chinese cabbage drove farmers to grow more.
Sun Jixiang, secretary-general of the Shandong Vegetable Association, said acreage devoted to cabbage didn't increase that much in the province. Farmers there planted more than 233,300 hectares in cabbages in 2009 and about 246,700 hectares last year, roughly a 5.7 percent increase. He said farmers shouldn't be blamed for the price fluctuations.
Cabbage production in South Korea nose-dived 30 percent last year as a result of bad weather, which boosted cabbage exports from Shandong province. South Korea suspended a 30 percent tariff on Chinese cabbage from Oct 14 to Dec 31 to help maintain adequate supplies for kimchi, the national dish. It is made of cabbage fermented in white radish and chili paste seasoning.
The South Korean cabbage crisis also led to a sudden rise in the price of cabbage sold in China, and some vegetable dealers and speculators manipulated supply in anticipation of an even bigger increase. They pulled many cabbages from the market and put them into freezers.
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