A RING OF GREEN
City farming in Shanghai. Photograph: Herbert Girardet
Urban farming in Shanghai
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SHANGHAI — China’s most important industrial, commercial and
financial centre — is a metropolis whose population has grown by
a third in less than twenty years. Today it supports 16 million people
and produces 5% of the country’s industrial output. But hand in hand
with this industrial growth is the production of food for the city’s
inhabitants from large areas of local farmland. This policy has been pursued
systematically since 1949 and continues unchanged today, even in the face
of the rapid growth of Shanghai’s commercial economy.
In the last fifty years, the total land area administered by the city
authorities expanded tenfold: today it is over 634,050 hectares. Just
over half this land is occupied by the city itself, whilst the other half,
much of it on the periphery, is largely devoted to highly intensive agriculture.
Some 800,000 people work this land, mainly by hand, producing vegetables,
rice and fruit as well as chicken, pork and carp meat. Traditional raised-bed
cultivation systems are still widely practised as well as polythene tunnels
and hydroponic (soil-less) cultivation.
Who are these urban farmers? Many of them are older local people who
continue a lifelong practice, and others are younger farmers who are migrants
from rural areas doing jobs that the people of Shanghai, increasingly
engaged in high-earning activities, no longer want to do. The traditional
practice of using night soil as fertilizer continues on some farms —
even on farms within the city itself. Growers there still keep large earthenware
jars in which they store the night soil, which is diluted with water and
then ladled onto the crops when required. The reality of rapid urban growth,
however, has also meant that flush toilets are becoming commonplace in
the city, making it much harder to collect night soil and to return it
to the land as fertilizer.
Throughout China, urban authorities are charged by central government to assure substantial food supplies from the urban areas they administer. Thus, even as land within Shanghai is being swallowed up by development, new greenhouses and specialized growing areas, using new techniques such as hydroponics, have been set up on the edge of the city. It seems that this policy for sustainable food supplies for an increasingly urban population is here to stay. China’s capacity to feed itself from farms in urban areas will certainly be affected, as ever-larger stretches of land are being paved over or developed into factories and housing estates. Nevertheless, the insistence of the country’s authorities on encouraging urban agriculture as part of its economic strategy is of great significance to China itself and, indeed, to the rest of the world.
Herbert Girardet