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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

This is China's attempt to end the artificial labor shortage problems they've been having in urban areas. It'll be trivial for China to increase the productivity of their farming massively, given how intentionally backwards it currently is.

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Intentionally?

What parent means probably is that, given a surplus of rural labor, farming has been intentionally kept backward so that all these nongmin have something to do. As labor moves from the country side to the cities, the requirement of giving people work to do just because disappears, and technology can be brought in so that agriculture more resembles that of a developed country.

They really need to do something about hukou first. I can't read the article yet because I'm behind the wall without a working VPN, perhaps they mention that.

I think I'd prefer for my food to come from that "backward" farming than the developed nation's industrial agriculture.

You know very little about agriculture in China I would guess. Short answer: no you don't. Long answer: we've had chicken, milk, pork, rice scares all in the last few months.

Okay maybe not that backward farming.

Citation? (preferably showing how widespread they are as well).

(While I agree with your point, alarm bells go off when I read lists of 'events' with no references)

I agree that references are nice. But then if someone is pushing an agenda it's easy for them to cherry pick the URLs they provide. So even if someone does provide references it's probably a good idea to use a search engine to check.

Milk 2008: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7614083.stm)

Milk 2010: (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126255525849313997.html)

Milk 2013: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22088977)

Glow in dark pork: (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8544851...)

Waste oil from gutters outside restaurants repackaged and sold for consumption: (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7971983...)

None of those are "from the last few months". And all of them are (pro) western media (less reliable).

In addition, it's seems non of them relate to China's intentional avoidance of modern technology in farming...

Here's an article about contaminated rice: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/cadmium-rice-...

Well, I'm living through it. We recently got chicken back in our work cafeteria after a couple of months without. Colleagues are still smuggling in milk powder from Hong Kong and other places abroad for their newborns, I think it's more illicit and expensive than cocaine now, but that might just be hyperbole. Rice is quite recent and the government is conducting nationwide soil tests.

Pork is always problematic since those babies are basically general waste recycling machines, it's hard to figure out what the nongmin are feeding them. Not sure of anything specific though, eventually all these scares start blurring together and I just stop caring too much.

Because agriculture is such a thankless job here, and gov regulation is weak, there is a lot of incentive for nongmin to cheat without much disincentive. And to be honest, the "industrialization farmed" or GMO food that many westerners are worried about....well, those are first world problems that we'd love to worry about instead.

Indeed, having so little economic productivity as to have a peasant class would give one someone to feel superior to, as an educated person. Their hovels are also wonderfully picturesque if one doesn't see that the building one thought derelict is actually inhabited by three families.

Yes, intentionally. China has, through various land and farming control laws, retarded their farming productivity to an extreme level.

While their manufacturing / industrial productivity and know-how has skyrocketed over 30 years, their farming productivity has kept pace. That's deliberate to give hundreds of millions of people something to do (as another comment noted). Their manufacturing sector could not absorb another 250 million people overnight (or over the prior 20 years).

South Korean farms are up to ten times more productive. If China's farming was as productive as South Korea, they'd only need 30 to 50 million farmers. Currently China has 37% of its employment base working in agriculture, or upwards of 300 million people. The US by comparison has a substantial surplus of food with just 4 to 5 million total people working in agriculture (including illegal immigrants).

This is a good opportunity to invest into farm equipment companies that will benefit from the coming boom in farming productivity in China. As they shift labor into their urban industrial base, they'll begin to change laws to boost farming productivity finally (most likely you'll see a big rise in large corporate farms in China).

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