China Daily Global Edition (USA)
How the nature of Chinese agriculture is changing
‘X iao Xu, what’s this?” asked one of the fellow reporters as we walked past a vast expanse of green and leafy bushes. We were on a two-week trip in Southwest China’s Yunnan province.
“Hmm, a type of plant,” I answered, followed by good-hearted laughter from others in the group, and then by an illustrative botanical lesson of what the plant actually is.
Such conversations had been taking place virtually on a daily basis during the trip, whenever a “plant” comes into visual range. It first occurred to my travel companions that my limited knowledge of botany could be a recurring joke when, on the second day of the trip, I cheerfully pointed at a field of tobacco blossoms and confidently called them rapeseed flowers. The two are similar, at least remotely, in case you’re wondering.
“A type of plant” has since become my unvarying and safest response to describe whatever grows in the ground, without further embarrassing myself. Barely discouraged by my ignorance and laziness to provide a more specific, or different, answer each time, the reporters in my group, most of whom are from central or provincial Chinese media outlets and senior to me both in age and experience, have helped me to recognize a number of fruits and crops, including kiwi, dragon fruit, macadamias, and coffee.
The trip is not a tutorial for me. I am Shanghai born and bred, and my knowledge of flora and fauna is mostly from textbooks — but only enough to pass the biology tests back in school.
As China celebrates the 70th anniversary of the founding of the country, the trip, bound for the Dehong Dai and Jingpo autonomous prefecture in western Yunnan province, bordering Myanmar, was for us to see how local people manage to create a harmonious life on the border while achieving a better life over the decades regardless of ethnic identity.
During our half month, we have been welcomed into numerous homes, where modern appliances such as TV sets and internet routers can be found together with traditional fireplaces and embroidered pictures. We have also been treated with feasts of Dai cuisine in these homes — food said to be the origin of Thai food, where flavorful pork, chicken and fish are spiced with passion fruit, lime and a variety of nameless herbs.
Over the meals, we have learned that the “plants” I failed to recognize, yet whose fruits have been so accessible and affordable for me in Shanghai, are some of the reasons residents have been raised from poverty to live a better life.
While tobacco remains one of the pillar products of Yunnan province, governments at different levels, local companies and individual farmers are striving to diversify the agricultural industry by introducing more profitable crops than the conventional likes of sugar cane and potatoes.
Not only have we been told that for every 0.06 hectare of land that replaces sugar cane with coffee beans, a farmer can earn a few thousand yuan more annually, which could pay two kids’ way through college.
We have also been surprised at how wise they are in taking advantage of the features of different plants and how they maximize the use of land by mixing plants together. In the case of one coffee farmer we visited, he has mingled a canopy of macadamia trees on his plantation so that his java could be grown in the shade, a globally proven method that benefits both the environment and the flavor of the beans.
In an era where people can chat with anyone, anywhere and anytime on the phone via the internet, we reporters have often been challenged with the face-to-face, on-site, live interviews.
My takeaway from the trip might help explain why we still need to free ourselves from computers outside the office and step into the real world. It’s not about knowing a few plants, whose images might be easily searched online. It’s about finding out what’s behind the plants and how they have changed my life and how they have changed the lives of the growers.
None of these fruits or nuts appeared at my home 20 years ago, as they were mostly expensive imports. Now they are changing the way the agriculture in China works.
For me, understanding begins with seeing them in the real world and asking the question, “What’s this?”