Organic food and alternative food networks in Beijing, China

    Before chemical inputs were invented, food was mainly produced in an ecological way. In the 1980s, China developed the capacity to build its own fertilizer plants, and since then, to sustain a growing population and maintain producers competitivity under market conditions, chemical fertilisers were largely used in food production to increase yields. Due to insufficient government supervision, food safety remains a prominent problem in Chinese society so far, which has caused consumers’ food safety anxieties.

    China’s contemporary food supply system has become more complicated over time as a result of its “large size, its millions of smallholders connected to (often distant) markets through unevenly developed physical, commercial and institutional infrastructure and the rapid growth of urban centres, which have increased the physical and social distance between food producers and consumers”. Due to urbanisation, the expansion of supermarkets and the management of urban food markets, traditional farmers’ markets began to decline. Numerous food safety scandals and distrust in the efficacy of state control over food safety have made consumers more sensitive to the ways of food production, especially the middle-class who are highly educated and with more income in large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

    In recent years in China, the food and environmental issues, and the new demand for healthy food, have given rise to a group of “new farmers” who go to the countryside to practice organic farming. Along with the rise of middle-class consumers who concern about the safety of their food, alternative food networks (AFNs) have begun to develop over the last decade in China. AFNs in China are very distinctive and situated within a particular background, including the characteristics of strongly consumer-driven, emphasis on healthfulness, and a minimal inclusion of “real” farmers in the construction of AFNs.

    AFNs represent ideals opposed to those of the mainstream, thereby offering insight into deep-seated social and cultural tensions. Traditionally, most agri-food studies emphasise either production or consumption while under-theorising or ignoring the other side. Since AFNs directly connect production and consumption, they provide a good example to explore production, consumption and their interactions.

    During the past decade, much research has been done on Chinese AFNs, working on issues such as the relations between AFNs and rural development, the role of AFNs in dealing with food security, community-supported agriculture, new farmers, consumers’ trust, consumer relationship management, non-certified organic food governance. These studies, however, are not sufficient to reveal the development logic and meanings of AFNs in China.

    The main research question this research seeks to explore is what are the key dynamics and associated geographies behind organic food production, distribution and consumption in AFNs in China. Beijing, as the capital of China and the birthplace of AFNs in mainland China, was selected as the location of the research. The research sites are in two farmers’ markets (FMs) – Beijing Farmers’ Market and F2N Market.

    From the perspectives of food producer (production), food consumer (consumption), and food distribution (from producer/production to consumer/consumption), this research provides four chapters including one about the literature review of AFNs that explores the definition of AFNs, and three investigations that aim to examine three research questions: 1) How the new farmers define themselves and how the new farmer identity results in the transformation in agriculture over recent years in China? 2) How do consumers understand their food practice in their daily embodied encounters with organic food? 3) What are the meanings of farmers markets in an urban context and the relationships between producers and consumers?

    These three investigations are good lenses through which to view changing identities, attitudes, beliefs and values held by the new generations of farmer and consumers. The main arguments of this research are fourfold: first, the development of AFNs in China is driven by a specific group of producers and consumers. Second, AFNs express the changing ideologies, values and meanings about organic food production, consumption and distribution over recent years in China. Third, with the research of Beijing Farmers’ Market, it argues that the socio-spatial embeddedness of this specific FM is a complex process of values and meanings mobilisation in the particular Chinese context. An important factor contributing to the success of Beijing Farmers’ Market is a combination of its social embeddedness and (extended) spatiality. And the last one is about the redefinition of AFNs. It argues that AFNs can be reconceptualised with geographical, social, temporal and moral reconnections. At the theoretical level, this research proposes two advances: on the one hand, the combination of three perspectives to investigate organic food production, consumption and distribution in AFNs, that is, the framework consisting of identity theory, “post-productivism” and “new peasantry”; “thinking as bodies”; and the interactions between social and spatial embeddedness of FM, and on the other hand, it points out a relational perspective to redefine AFNs.