Efficiency, yes! But, Can China Produce Safe Horticulture Commodities?

By Jikun Huang, Huayong Zhi and Scott Rozelle

Paper for the 2008 ITRAC meetings, Washington DC

There have been growing concerns on the impacts of rapid changes in downstream of food market chains on small farmers in the developing countries. Modern retails, particular supermarkets, have been emerging in many developing countries since early 1990s. Previous studies believe that there could have serious distributional impacts of the rise of supermarkets in downstream of the market chain. However, the findings from China on the impacts of rising supermarket and other marketing chain changes on production and marketing at the farm level, however, are mixed.

In this paper, we seek to help provide evidence to help clarify this debate. Specifically, in this paper we are examining nature of the production and marketing activities of horticultural producers in China from the farm level.

http://aede.osu.edu/programs/Anderson/trade/HuangRozelle.pdf