John Hermanson <omtech1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've seen stories on factory hog farms in the South. Really disgusting
> and destroys the land and ecosystem. Imagine what China could do with
> it? ;- )
China's destroying the ecosystem with inefficient coal-fired power plants,
unregulated factories, ... but not so much with factory farming. There are
some huge fish farming operations, and whole mountainsides of tea,
but not many other big farms.
China's about the same land area as the US, but with a lower proportion
of arable land, much more mountain & desert, and at least three times
the population. Also, much less urbanised than Western countries, over
half the population (800 million or so, I think) are in the rural villages.
Farms are small; there's not enough land to go around. People plant
vegetables on highway medians. Any land worth farming has had
people farming it for millennia, in some cases, the same families
for centuries.
A big part of Mao's revolution was land reform, often implemented by
shooting landlords. That broke up a lot of large farming operations.
Later, Mao & the lads experimented with big collective farms, and
that mostly failed.
Peasants are important politically here; Mao's big difference with
Marx & Lenin & company was that his was a peasant revolution,
not the urban proletariat "in the vanguard". That's still a big part
of the Party's image, (though there is a serious problem with
corrupt Party officials expropriating land, underpaying peasants,
and giving sweet deals to their developer buddies). Also, there
are an awful lot of peasants.
The peasants are also pretty conservative in some ways. They
raise hell about some of the expropriations and generally cling
rather feircely to their land. I don't think factory farming would
be any easy sell.
--
Sandy Harris,
Quanzhou, Fujian, China
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|