By good luck or Yan’s strategic planning, the few days between the end of the IFOAM General Assembly and the date for my Taiwan tour coincided with “New Farmer, New Countryside: the Third National Conference of Community Supported Agriculture” at Renmin University in Beijing. I had the honor of being the keynote speaker: I presented a newly updated version of my ever evolving illustrated talk on “CSA Around the World”. Hot off the presses was Yan and Cheng’s translation of Sharing the Harvest in time for us to celebrate the release of the book.
Over 400 attended the conference – farmers, organizers, undergraduate, graduate students and faculty. Many were delegates from over 150 ecological farming projects. At the plenary sessions, I was seated in the front row with the dignitaries, university professors and government officials. Most of the participants were 20 – 30 somethings, both men and women, with only a sprinkling of gray hairs. They showed an amazing level of commitment, sitting through workshops from 9 am till 10 pm! At breaks, a roar of networking erupted. If I can judge from the discussions at the end of each session, Chinese organic people are long-winded – and impressively long on the ability to listen to one another. They greeted me with overwhelming warmth. There was a lot of friendly laughter, though my volunteer interpreters were rarely up to translating the jokes and wisecracks. Outdoing even the Japanese, the Chinese delight in photo opportunities. I must have had my photo taken 200 times with different conference participants. Yan had told me that organic in China is no longer just a top-down, export-oriented program, but a grassroots movement. The palpable energy at this conference is evidence of this exciting development.
The farm manager at Little Donkey, Yan Xiaohui, opened the conference by outlining the kinds of problems to be solved: food quality and security, pollution from agriculture and the urban-rural gap. He evaluated Little Donkey’s success so far in addressing these challenges. Zhang Zhimin and Yan told about the growth of the Beijing CSA Union and the development of a national CSA network. According to Yan, middle class people, who are keeping city jobs, are returning to villages to manage organic farms. While CSAs like Little Donkey and Big Buffalo have government and university support, farmers are establishing others on their own by connecting with citizens who care about food quality and sourcing food from people they trust. You can read a version of Yan’s paper in the proceedings for the IFOAM Organic World Congress.
Thanks to a series of interpreters, I was able to make some sense of the workshops I attended. With two tracks at each time slot, the best I could do was to cover half of what went on. The content was surprisingly familiar, like a Chinese version of CSA conferences I have attended in the US and England. I heard detailed reports on CSAs – university supported projects, farmer and ngo initiated ventures, a variety of other direct marketing enterprises, some farmer cooperatives, and basic topics in organic methods, farm management, composting, seed saving, ecological architecture, certification and participatory guarantee systems. A farmer with many years of experience with organic practices talked about discovering CSA and appreciating the improvement in marketing and community support. Two new farmers from non-rural backgrounds talked about their paths to organic farming. A Bejing restauranteur from The Veggie Table listed his catchy 6 “m”s – meal, menu, music, manner, mood, meeting, and described how he purchases 60% of the ingredients for his menu from local organic farms. A professor of health analyzed the relationship between unhealthy life styles and disease.
A dramatic confrontation between a father, who had become a migrant worker in the city, sacrificing to give his son an education, and the son, who had decided to return to their village to be an ecological farmer, set off a highly emotional discussion that echoed through the two days. Another recurrent theme was the communication and marketing difficulties experienced by farmers who live in isolated areas, too far from cities. Li Zhao reported on the Green Ground Union, a project started by Professor Wen as a company in 2000. After meetings with farmers to learn about the problems in villages, they decided to focus on developing ecological agriculture as the best path to food safety and feeding the countryside. I would love to have a better understanding of what Li Zhao meant by “self-controlling” as a new way to build social trust. I missed sessions on the multi-functionality of agriculture, the many new farmers’ markets in Shanghai, Chengdu and Nanjing, “original taste,” restaurant supported agriculture, a community kitchen in Hongkong and Slow Food in China.
At the closing plenary, after a concise report on the IFOAM certification system and the principles of organic agriculture, Zhou Zelong, IFOAM’s representative in China, concluded with the new emphasis on Participatory Guarantee Systems. I was surprised that as illustration, he showed photos of his recent visit to a US farm in Connecticut that uses the NOFA Farmers Pledge instead of certification.
โชคดีหรือย่านของการวางแผนเชิงกลยุทธ์ สองสามวันระหว่างการสิ้นสุดของ IFOAM สมัชชาและวันทัวร์ไต้หวันของฉันร่วมกับ "ชาวนาใหม่ ชนบทใหม่: กิตติสามของเกษตรรองรับชุมชน" หมิมหาวิทยาลัยในปักกิ่ง มีเกียรติเป็น ผู้บรรยายประเด็นสำคัญ: ฉันนำเสนอพูดคุยพร้อมรูปภาพของฉันเคยพัฒนาบน "CSA รอบโลก" รุ่นปรับปรุงใหม่ ร้อนจากการกดถูกยานและของเฉิงแปลร่วมกันเก็บเกี่ยวในเวลาที่เราจะเฉลิมฉลองการเปิดตัวของหนังสือกว่า 400 ร่วมประชุม – เกษตรกร ออร์แกนไนเซอร์ ทุนระดับปริญญาตรี นักศึกษา และคณาจารย์ หลายคนจากกว่า 150 โครงการนาระบบนิเวศได้ ที่ทุกร ฉันที่นั่งในแถวหน้ากับสาแหรก อาจารย์มหาวิทยาลัย และเจ้าหน้าที่ของรัฐ 20-30 เรื่อง ทั้งชายและหญิง มีเฉพาะเมื่อเป็นเส้นขนสีเทาที่สุดของผู้เข้าร่วมได้ พวกเขาแสดงให้เห็นว่าระดับการตื่นตาตื่นใจของความมุ่งมั่น นั่งผ่านการประชุมเชิงปฏิบัติการตั้งแต่ 9.00 น.ถึง 22.00 น. เสียงคำรามของระบบเครือข่ายที่แบ่ง ได้ระเบิด ถ้าฉันสามารถตัดสินจากการสนทนาในตอนท้ายของแต่ละเซสชัน คนจีนอินทรีย์มี long-winded – และลองคลายความสามารถในการฟังกัน พวกเขาประทับใจฉันกับครอบงำความอบอุ่น มีมากมิตรหัวเราะ ถึงล่ามอาสาสมัครของฉันไม่ค่อยได้แปลตลกและ wisecracks Outdoing แม้แต่ญี่ปุ่น จีนสุขในการถ่ายภาพ ฉันต้องมีฉันถ่าย 200 เท่ากับผู้เข้าร่วมประชุมที่แตกต่างกัน ยานได้บอกฉันเป็นอินทรีย์ซึ่งในจีนไม่เพียงบนลงล่าง การส่งออกโปรแกรม แต่รากหญ้าเคลื่อนไหว พลังงานที่เห็นได้ชัดจากที่ประชุมนี้เป็นหลักฐานของการพัฒนาที่น่าตื่นเต้นนี้The farm manager at Little Donkey, Yan Xiaohui, opened the conference by outlining the kinds of problems to be solved: food quality and security, pollution from agriculture and the urban-rural gap. He evaluated Little Donkey’s success so far in addressing these challenges. Zhang Zhimin and Yan told about the growth of the Beijing CSA Union and the development of a national CSA network. According to Yan, middle class people, who are keeping city jobs, are returning to villages to manage organic farms. While CSAs like Little Donkey and Big Buffalo have government and university support, farmers are establishing others on their own by connecting with citizens who care about food quality and sourcing food from people they trust. You can read a version of Yan’s paper in the proceedings for the IFOAM Organic World Congress.Thanks to a series of interpreters, I was able to make some sense of the workshops I attended. With two tracks at each time slot, the best I could do was to cover half of what went on. The content was surprisingly familiar, like a Chinese version of CSA conferences I have attended in the US and England. I heard detailed reports on CSAs – university supported projects, farmer and ngo initiated ventures, a variety of other direct marketing enterprises, some farmer cooperatives, and basic topics in organic methods, farm management, composting, seed saving, ecological architecture, certification and participatory guarantee systems. A farmer with many years of experience with organic practices talked about discovering CSA and appreciating the improvement in marketing and community support. Two new farmers from non-rural backgrounds talked about their paths to organic farming. A Bejing restauranteur from The Veggie Table listed his catchy 6 “m”s – meal, menu, music, manner, mood, meeting, and described how he purchases 60% of the ingredients for his menu from local organic farms. A professor of health analyzed the relationship between unhealthy life styles and disease.A dramatic confrontation between a father, who had become a migrant worker in the city, sacrificing to give his son an education, and the son, who had decided to return to their village to be an ecological farmer, set off a highly emotional discussion that echoed through the two days. Another recurrent theme was the communication and marketing difficulties experienced by farmers who live in isolated areas, too far from cities. Li Zhao reported on the Green Ground Union, a project started by Professor Wen as a company in 2000. After meetings with farmers to learn about the problems in villages, they decided to focus on developing ecological agriculture as the best path to food safety and feeding the countryside. I would love to have a better understanding of what Li Zhao meant by “self-controlling” as a new way to build social trust. I missed sessions on the multi-functionality of agriculture, the many new farmers’ markets in Shanghai, Chengdu and Nanjing, “original taste,” restaurant supported agriculture, a community kitchen in Hongkong and Slow Food in China.At the closing plenary, after a concise report on the IFOAM certification system and the principles of organic agriculture, Zhou Zelong, IFOAM’s representative in China, concluded with the new emphasis on Participatory Guarantee Systems. I was surprised that as illustration, he showed photos of his recent visit to a US farm in Connecticut that uses the NOFA Farmers Pledge instead of certification.
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