Small Holder Incomes, Food Safety and Producing, and Marketing China's Fruit

By Jikun Huang, Yunhua Wu, Huayong Zhi, and Scott Rozelle

Review of Agricultural Economics-Volume 30, Number 3-Pages 469-479, 2008

The purpose of this article is to try to understand whether the recent changes in China's food economy have exacerbated or contributed to an improvement in poverty reduction (or betterment of small farmers) and/or food safety. To do so, we will draw on a dataset that we collected in 2007 of representative apple and grape farmers in Shandong province, one of the fruit baskets of China. Using these data, we describe the emergence of the production and marketing structures of our sample. Next, we examine whether it is small or large farmers (or rich or poor ones) that are entering the horticultural economy through different types of marketing channels. Finally, we examine several indicators of producer-trader behavior that will help us understand whether or not China's horticultural marketing channels are able to guarantee that the consumer is purchasing a safe, traceable product.

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