Category Archives: Rural Development

Jan Schakel in China – part two

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The IMRD-students, who are visiting China to do their case study, just finished their fieldwork in the Bamudi-village in the Yanqing County, North of Beijing. After three weeks of lectures, fieldtrips and surveys, they now will write the final report in the last week of their stay in China. The report will cover the findings from interviews, visits and meeting with farmers, village leaders, shop keepers and other households in the Bamudi-village (Beijing) and Quaoli village (Nanjing).

Part of the methodology of the PRA (Participatory Rapid Appraisal) is to provide a ‘Community Development Program’ and to present and discuss this plan with local inhabitants in the Village Hall to have feedback from the farmers and others involved. It will be a thrilling event, because the situation is rather complex; also in this area, not too far from Beijing.

Industrialization in China started before urbanization (heavy industry in the sixties in the middle and Northeast of China), but in recent decades urbanization is really skyrocketing: from 10% in 1949 and still only 18% in 1979 to almost up to 50% in 2007! Actually, just some month ago, there were –for the first time in their long history- more people living in the cities then in the rural areas! Although the number of ‘the poor’ (which was for a long time synonymous with ‘the rural’) decreased from 250 million in 1978 to less then 15 million in 2007, the rural area still faces tremendous problems. The unique rural-urban migration in China (young labour left to the cities) resulted in disorganization of rural communities and the erosion or even loss of cultural identity, values and the ability of collective action, as well as issues of elites that are leaving, while vulnerable groups are ‘left-behind’.

Box 1: ‘Poor, so rural….’

One of the farmers we visited (see picture) lives in a remote area, just outside Bamudi-village. The farmer is suffering high blood pressure for many years, and his wife (both in their sixties) is illiterate. They own their house (built in 1962) and rent 3,5 mu of land (0,2 ha.), growing mostly corn, fruit and some vegetables. Last year they earned 2000 Yan (200 Euro) by selling apricot to the market, but this year there is hardly any harvest at all, due to the chilly spring. Opposite to other rural families, they don’t have remittances from family members who work in the city (migrant workers), so the family income is only 5000-6000 Yan (or RMB) a year (around 550 Euro), which is really low, even to Chinese standards. As part of  the new pro-farming-policies, the household will have some extra income, like social security and minimum living standard subsidies, compensation for environmental protection schemes, alleviation of agri-tax and subsidies for certain products (mainly grain). The liveability of the community and the households will also be improved by measures of the New Countryside Construction Program; see box 2).

Village farmer

The situation in Bamudi-village is really complex, because a new phenomena – besides the traditional rural-urban-migration processes- is occurring in the region: the urban-rural-migration, which expresses the rediscovery of the rural area by the urban, and a new relation between the city and the countryside. During all the interviews in the village, it became clear that neither the central, nor the provincial government, and neither the county or the village leaders knew how to handle this new phenomena. There are no rules, nor policies and regulations, and the traditional land tenure system doesn’t fit to tackle this new migration process. One of the conclusions, drawn by the students after doing their surveys, is that there is hardly any future in this part of China, if they follow the traditional route or path of development. The growing conditions in this mountainous area very bad, and together with the lack of skilled labour and motivated young people, it rural life is very hard and it will imply the end of agriculture around the municipality of Beijing. Only mostly elderly people will stay in the village, while the rest of the family moves out to the cities. But due to polices (among others) from the NCCP (see box 2), like reafforistication and environmental protection, there might be new sources of income be created. That Bamudi village will be Beijing’s  ‘back garden’ in the near future, implies definitely the final end of a long agricultural tradition, but it will also give the area the opportunity to (re-)develop again in a more modern and more successful way.

We are looking forward to listen and learn what the local villagers will think about the analyses the students have made and the findings that will be presented and discussed tonight; we’re all looking forward to their comments and opinions. And hope that indeed it will be a thrilling night!

Box 2: New Countryside Construction Program (NCCP)

In 2006 the Chinese government launched a new plan to restore the balance and the inequity between the rural and the urban. Part of it will be the NCCP. Background of the NCCP is the rapid industrialization and urbanization, which widened the gap between urban and rural, and forced the state to support farmers and pay more attention to resource and environmental protection. Part of it will be an urbanization strategy: no allowing for most farmers to go to towns, but stay in the villages. To improve the living conditions in these villages, several measures were undertaken, like: promoting agriculture production, e.g. agricultural industrialization infrastructural development like roads, drinking water, street lights employing farmers tot protect non-governmental forests, waters, roads and environment providing public goods: medical, rural education, energy, communication and so on increasing farmers income by subsidies, human resource development, providing help to the poor (among others).

Jan Schakel, Bamudi-Village

Jan Schakel in China – part one

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A group of IMRD-students from different European countries is visiting China this month, doing a case study for their International Master in Rural Development. The first part took place in Nanjing in the Jiangsu Province (200 miles west of Shanghai), where the Nanjing Agriculture University hosted the students for two weeks. Besides lectures by professors from the NAU (who actually knew Wageningen University very well, because most of them did their MSc and/or PhD at the WU!), fieldwork was done in two villages in the rural area south of Nanjing. Together with 25 Chinese undergraduate students from all over China (doing a summer school at the NAU), different households were visited and many farmers (mostly female: so called ‘left-behind-woman’, who’s husbands are migrant workers in the big cities) were interviewed. All information gathered by both European and Chinese students was presented at the university and put together in a final report (soon available on the IMRD-website).

Official group photo

More or less the same program is organized by the Chinese Agriculture University in Beijing (ranked nr. 1’s Agriculture University of China), who is responsible for the second half of the IMRD case study. The COHD (College of Humanities and Development) is hosting us, and also the COHD is a leading centre of excellence on rural development within and outside China. Among others, the COHD is monitoring, analysing and evaluating the new ‘Pro-Farmers-Policies’, as well as the New Countryside Construction Programme (2006). These new policies, programs and measures should tackle the ‘dualism’ between the rural and the urban; a very serious problem threatening China stability as a whole and the future of China’s rural areas more particularly. Part of the New Countryside Construction Program is the Village Development Program (VDP, also from 2006), which will also monitored, steered and evaluated by the COHD.

The IMRD students is given the opportunity to have a closer look at the VDP in an area 2 hours north of Beijing. Fieldwork will be done in 5 days through the use of the PRA-methodology (Participatory Rapid Appraisal) in the Bamudi village in the Yanqing county. With a group of 5 Chinese master students and their professors, farmers, village leaders and others in Bamudi-village will be interviewed and observed by means of several participatory methods.

So far this Case study is really impressive – in all kinds of ways. But: not only me, but also the IMRD-students are getting tired. It’s summertime in China, and in Nanjing (with over 8 million people) and Beijing (almost over 18 million inhabitants) it is 3xH: Hot (over 35 Degrees Celsius), Hazy and Humid, and it’s crowded everywhere. So tomorrow we will leave the city and go to the mountains, where it’s a little bit cooler (although you don’t feel the difference anymore between 38 and 34 degrees). The bad news however is that the mosquito’s are waiting for us, and that there is no internet, no air-conditioning, no shower, no shop, no restaurant nor anything in Bamudi; so it’s going to be a week really ‘doing fielwork’ , and the forthcoming days no more news on our weblog!

By the way: also in Beijing I noticed that Wageningen is rather well-known. Everybody still speaks about professor ‘Jan Douwe’ (they call me ‘prof. Jan’), who visited BAU over a month ago, and who must has done a really great and impressive job, because everyone asks me about him. However, not everyone is really pleased with him; I met a member of the COHD who is (among others) translating Jan Douwe van der Ploeg’s most recently book ‘The New Peasantries’ into Chinese, and it seems to be a ‘hell of a job’. But when it is finished -and that will be within a short period- this book will also be available to at least 1.300.000.000 Chinese people, so well done Jan Douwe!

Jan Schakel, Beijing 2009-08-01

Rural development driven by unfolding rural webs

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Today the main outcomes of the EU-funded project ETUDE were presented by our colleagues Jan Douwe van der Ploeg (scientific coordinator of ETUDE), Rudolf van Broekhuizen (project-coordinator) and Henk Oostindie (senior researcher).  Main finding is that neither policy, nor markets or grass root rural development activities are by itself decisive for successful rural development, but the web of different and increasingly interlinked networks. Or as Jan Douwe van der Ploeg states:

Successful rural development is rooted in a myriad of encounters, transactions, interactions and networks that link people, resources, activities and markets. (Source: E-magazine by British Publisher, pp. 64-65). 

Van der Ploeg & Marsden (in ‘Some Final Reflections’, the concluding chapter in the book ‘Unfolding webs’ , p 227) refer to these rural web as emerging counter-structures: 

because rural development processes (that are grounded upon and resulting from this web) are essentially transitional: they represent a major shift that takes many years to occur and which proceeds through changing conditions of invisibility and confusion. Visibility, coherence and comprehension only occur during, and as an effect of, this transition. We also refer to the rural web as a counter-structure because it increasingly helps to deal with complexity (especially Chapter 8 of this Volume), creating simultaneously new patterns of coherence. All this relates to the contested nature of rural development: what might be highly meaningful in terms of the rural web, might be insignificant or even ludicrous at the level of the dominant structure. What we are beginning to conceptually explain here, therefore, are the particular dynamic qualities (both new coherences and contestations) of web formation. These are, indeed, built out of the seeming contradiction between creating counter-structures to prevailing conditions, at the same time as re-creating new coherences out of these very deviations and ruptures.

The project has come to a closure. The findings and recommendations will soon be published in a second book. Earlier publications, such as the chapters of the first book ‘Unfolding webs’, edited by Jan Douwe van der Ploeg & Terry Marsden and published by Royal Van Gorcum, and deliverables (e.g. case study reports) can be downloaded at the ETUDE-website.

For more information on the outcomes you can contact one of the colleagues.

Land abandonment in Galicia

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By Marlies Meijer (MSc-student)

Land Abandonment in Galicia

Land abandonment in Galicia

As I wrote earlier, I am balancing between the multiple realities of Galicia. Now, several weeks later I’m still balancing. Off course everything is different than the assumptions and hypotheses I had in the Netherlands. The rural situation here is complex and has many faces. For the moment I am trying to untangle the different storylines I encounter here. Hopefully one or two are nice enough to work out and to connect to a more theoretical storyline. It is a delicate job, which can only be completed in Spanish (I never realised that almost closed scientific communities existed because of language barriers) and with as less generalisation as possible, as ‘everything is different is Galicia’. It also implies that I have to let go of my Dutch reality and leave behind the loose ends I developed back home.

Land abandonment  – One of the storylines I encountered is land abandonment. Almost 25 % of the Galician countryside is abandoned, with far-reaching effects. In the Netherlands we would call an abandoned parcel new nature or verrommeld (messy). Here it implies higher chances for forest fires and agricultural devaluation. Rural Galicia exists of many small farms, with small parcels and above all many land owners. Most landowners simply own land, they do not live there, nor do they use the land for (agricultural) production. Because of low costs it is possible to own land, and leave it more or less abandoned. Most owners do not want to sell their land, they prefer to keep it as a capital resource for economically bad times, or in case its value increases because of urban expansion or afforestation. Some owners are simply not aware of the fact that they own land. Because of a malfunctioning administrative system and a lack of a clear spatial policy these situations can occur everywhere and to everyone, only no one knows exactly where.

On the other hand most farmers or peasants are not able to buy extra land. Their resources are limited. In the past decades the most substantial farmers already invested in milk quota, machinery and other devices in order to catch up with the rest of Europe.

The result is a situation where spatial and rural developments are fixated. Measures are developed to loosen the situation; for instance a land bank to facilitate renting land to other users, in order to mobilise the land market. But also these measures encounter problems.

On the one hand, Galicia struggles with policies from the past and large measures (top down) that are needed to change and improve the rural situation. Modernisation, like elsewhere in Europe, did not take place in Galicia. Notwithstanding the problems it brought to other countries, it is a phase needed in this country to improve the quality of life on the countryside. On the other hand, we do live in an era where bottom-up approaches and local participation are preferred, also in Galicia this is an hot item. How these two extremes are intertwined seems to me an interesting starting point for further research in Galicia.

Sioux City and Community Development

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Monday, I embarked on a 15 day travel with Cornelia and Jan Flora, stopping by various meetings, projects and conferences in a south west direction from Ames, Iowa to Arizona and back. The amount of car miles involved would get me twice around the Netherlands I suppose. We started with a meeting in Sioux City, a city in the north west of Iowa bordering Nebraska.

STA71678We are meeting in a recently restored old boiler building which once served 46 building in this neighborhood. This old industrial neighborhood is being redeveloped as Sioux City tries to reinvent itself as an arts and cultural city. However, its history is tightly connected to agriculture through the stock yards, the traditional trading place for farm animals. Therefore it stays as somebody said “a cowmen’s town with an opera”.

Well, I heard last night that it was not only about men. Traditionally, the stock yard was surrounded by cowboy saloons and brothels. The brothels, where a Madame ruled, were important places for local business and access to capital.The Madame had a very powerful position and was often involved in providing micro loans and other financial services in a time where banks were not easily accessible.

However, we are here for another type of community development…. Faculty members of 5 Midwestern universities discuss here the Community Development On-line Master’s Program in which they are involved together. This is quite a unique situation, a full online course offered jointly by the universities of Iowa State, North Dakota State, Kansas State, South Dakota State and Nebraska-Lincoln under the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance.

The Community Development Program began in the fall of 2005, and it was initially funded through a National Higher Education grant. Since the grant has ended, the program continued and supports itself. Students in the program are from all over the United States, as well as other countries. Many of them combine the Master with their (community) work and/or family. The program won two awards in 2008, a state and a national award. Jan and Cornelia Flora are both involved in the Program as teachers and Jan Flora won two grants in 2008 which allow for the development of two new courses within the Master, one on Sustainable Communities and the other on Immigrants in Communities.

Online Bachelor and Master programs are becoming rapidly popular. For universities, such as those in the Midwest it represents an opportunity to new attract students to universities in States which show a downward demographic trend. And the online – placeless programs also attract new categories of students, such as those who are forced to come out of retirement because of financial problems and need to ‘rewire’ themselves.