Can Consumption Create a Better Natural and Social Environment? | 315 Consumer Rights Day Mini Discussion No. 3

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Foodthink Says

The previous article noted that consumers, being too far removed from the production end, find it difficult to truly understand the quality of their food, and so to effectively safeguard their own interests. To address this problem, practices based on the Participatory Guarantee System (referred to below as PGS) have already begun in China. PGS emphasises that all “stakeholders”—producers, consumers, and sellers, among others—should collaborate to co-create the ideas and rules governing food quality and consumption.

By analysing the principles behind this practice and the current state of its development in China, let us, on 315 Consumer Rights Day, further reflect on the social value of consumer behaviour and make better choices in the future.

I. The Case for PGS

Compared with the mainstream market, PGS seeks to rebuild the direct connection between small-scale producers and consumers, giving consumers a greater right to information and smallholders a greater voice, so as to co-create an understanding of food’s value that differs from that of the mainstream market. This, too, is what makes an alternative food system “alternative”.

● During my PhD research, I (right) participated in several PGS farm visits at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market. Pictured here: Chen Liye (left) of Hebei Wocuiyuan Farm and Li Shu (centre) of Xihu, who make steamed buns using their flour, are giving me an introduction to the farm.

PGS advocates two core principles. The first is opposition to one-size-fits-all production standards. Production is inherently a site-specific endeavour, so standardised norms cannot encompass the diverse modes of production across all regions. Imposing standardised requirements on producers only serves to marginalise diversified farming and undermines local ecosystems. It also weakens producers’ agency and can lead them to manipulate production data to meet the standards.

In China, the testing cycles designed for organic certification are in fact better suited to assessing large-scale monoculture. Many smallholders practise diversified planting and rotate different crop varieties far more frequently, so the measurement processes required by certification simply cannot align with their production schedules. This is one of the key reasons smallholders find certification difficult—or even undesirable—to pursue.

● A key function of PGS is using farm visits to build a shared understanding of quality among all stakeholders.

The second principle is that, if uniform production standards are inapplicable, then we must look for standards grounded in a particular community or shared commonwealth. PGS holds that such standards should be co-determined by producers and local consumers—who, through the mutual understanding they build, develop a set of codes of conduct they can all endorse.

This requires thorough communication and understanding between consumers and producers. On the one hand, consumers need a full grasp of what production actually involves. On that basis, consumers and producers can discuss production norms: what kind of produce we can expect, and what constitutes good produce. Both sides then produce and consume under this agreed framework. Information transparency is achieved through the process of collaborative negotiation.

For example, if consumers want fruit and vegetables grown without pesticides or chemical fertilisers, producers will tell them that such produce may have insect holes, may not look perfectly neat, and may cost a little more to grow. A rational consumer will understand that food that is cheap, safe and beautiful all at once is simply unrealistic, and will make choices that suit them when shopping.

● Yingying from Chengde Lianxiang Farm explains the pest problems her tomatoes have faced to visiting consumers.

II. The Predicament of PGS

But in practice, PGS exists in tension with mainstream market norms.

The first is a mismatch between inputs and outputs—or, to put it another way, the tripartite relationship of rights, responsibilities and benefits is not as smooth as it is under conventional commercial, social and political systems. PGS carries very high organisational costs, yet there is no corresponding direct economic return. This raises the question of incentives: who is willing to invest the effort of organising PGS? And what returns can they expect after spending so much time, travel and communication?

We can compare the reporting methods of PGS and certification. Certification systems essentially create market exclusivity. Certification bodies receive direct economic returns, while those being certified obtain certification—a ticket of entry into an exclusive market—and a relatively high premium.

But participatory guarantee is a community-based practice, so the codes of conduct and outcomes it establishes are assets of the entire food community, shared among its members.

Take the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, the most mature PGS initiative in China. Even a consumer who has never personally attended a PGS farm visit but who knows others have, hears them speak well of a particular producer, and sees photos and outcomes of the visit on social media, will use that trust to choose a producer.

Similarly, for producers—not every farmer will participate in overseeing other farmers, but as long as any farmer earns consumer recognition through this process, that recognition translates into the market’s reputation, and everyone participating in the market can share it.

Simply put, not all consumers and farming partners contribute equally to PGS, yet everyone shares the fruits of this oversight on an equal basis. This raises a problem: if you can benefit without investing, how do you incentivise these actors not to free-ride? Who should bear the cost of organising PGS? The consumers? Or the social organisations that connect all producers with consumers? And what proportion should the producers who rely on the market’s reputation bear?

The second limitation is that PGS presupposes a boundary in scope. Because its organisational costs are high and the intensity of interaction is great, it cannot be replicated as quickly as a one-off transaction in a market; it can only be realised among a specific group of people. In other words, it can only serve a particular set of producers within a small market and a very small group of consumers compared with the mainstream market. It is based on forming a locally rooted consumer community—a relatively fixed, close-knit social network.

Yet the business model of the mainstream market demands constant expansion, or else market share is lost to competitors. It must continually attract new customers by cutting costs and adding new products. Can the market safeguarded by PGS withstand the impact of the mainstream market’s scale-oriented business model?

●In settings like farmers’ markets, consumers can also communicate directly with producers and learn about production practices. But under the impact of e-commerce, fewer and fewer consumers are willing to go out to buy vegetables.

III. Compromises in PGS Practice

Faced with the high cost of participation, a limited market and relentless competition, PGS in practice frequently compromises on the form and frequency of participation. The resulting level of engagement is insufficient for consumers to build in-depth knowledge of production, or for consumers and producers to develop knowledge-sharing or a consensus on production norms.

The most typical forms of PGS organisation we observe are farm visits and regular updates on farm production. Both of these activities, however, entail substantial organisational costs.

For example, before a PGS farm visit, market staff must carry out extensive preparatory work, issue announcements, and then lead consumers to the production site.

During the visit, organisers must also guide consumers through the farm’s entire production process, the farmer explains each stage of production, and feedback must be collected from consumers afterwards. From the organisers’ perspective, this demands a great deal of time and human resources.

●After every PGS visit, the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market invites participants to fill in a feedback form, collecting their understanding of and comments on the farm’s production.
●One page of a feedback form completed by a consumer at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market after a PGS visit. It shows that visitors are expected to gain a comprehensive understanding of the farm’s production information, with each item corresponding to the principles and techniques of ecological agriculture.

By contrast, on some other platforms the form of PGS has been so drastically simplified that it is hard to tell how it differs from more overt forms of marketing. For instance, live-streaming has replaced farm visits requiring consumers’ physical presence; updates on farm production may simply be dropped altogether. Or when a new producer joins the platform, a producer’s story is presented alongside a soil testing report and a product testing report, and these are used to stand in for ongoing monitoring and follow-up of production practices. In reality, this has become highly similar to the marketing approach of Whole Foods Market: by “staging” information transparency—presenting consumers with images of a particular production process—consumers remain in fact far removed from the producers.

●Zhiqiang of Chengde Lianxiang Farm shows the PGS visit group from the farmers’ market a sample of soil. Observing, smelling and touching the soil in person, and decoding the information conveyed through these senses, gives a more comprehensive picture of soil quality than any soil testing report.
Another practical problem is that many producers find their time entirely absorbed by production and business operations, leaving them little energy to organise or even participate in PGS. This, too, weakens the role of peer review, mutual learning and exchange that PGS aspires to foster.

IV. The Predicament of Consumer Participation

From the consumer’s perspective, carving out time to participate in PGS from what is already scarce leisure time—especially given the pressures of work and daily life—represents a significant investment. A deeper question, however, is: which consumers are actually taking part?

Based on my observation, at least 60–70 per cent of food-consumption decisions within a household are made by women. Some are homemakers; others work and have children. What they share is the responsibility for selecting and cooking the family’s food, and the duties they shoulder within the household extend far beyond this.

Many female consumers have said that they only began paying attention to organic ingredients after having children—the implication being that parenthood marks a major watershed in their lives. Once children arrive, raising them becomes one of the key threads running through the organisation of their days. And in China, parenting is an enormously pressurised undertaking, especially for the middle class, where there is an expectation of intensive, refined parenting, and the work of care falls almost entirely on women. A mother’s daily schedule is both tightly packed and exhausting.

Yet, on the other hand, the work she does is not necessarily acknowledged or valued within the household. I once asked a mother what her husband thought, given the extraordinary attention she paid to the children’s—or indeed the whole family’s—diet. She replied: “As long as Dad doesn’t get in the way, that’s enough.”

That answer stunned me. On one hand, it reveals the enormous burden women bear in domestic labour and the division of roles within the family. Yet the value of this work is not understood by society—or even by the members of her own family. In such circumstances, female consumers can scarcely find the energy to participate in PGS; even if they wished to, their families may regard it as unnecessary—”If you have spare time, better spend it taking the children to cram school.”

●A glance at the group photos from successive PGS visits at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market reveals that the vast majority of participating consumers are women. In this photo taken after a visit to Hebei Happy Returning Youth Farm in September 2023, the few men present are almost entirely there for work-related reasons.

Constrained by these factors, most consumers can, at best, participate in one or two farm visits to build some interaction with the producer or PGS organiser, and form a general impression of organic production through the farmers’ market or online.

While this may already put them ahead of 99.9 per cent of urban consumers in the country in terms of knowledge about agricultural production, the impression they form is not necessarily grounded in the rigour of production knowledge—or, put another way, rarely rests on agricultural knowledge itself. For many consumers without a foundation in organic production, when visiting a farm, they don’t even know what to look for. They may simply glance around superficially, spotting things they find novel, and be unable to assess the information producers share with them critically.

●In fact, many consumers who lack practical knowledge of farming, upon arriving at a farm, are just like I was at that stage: Where is this? What is this? What am I looking at? What should I be looking at? In short, rather bewildered.

In such circumstances, consumers’ judgements are often “relational”—based on accumulated experiences of interpersonal interaction, or certain cultural habits, arriving at a relational, emotional assessment. For example, something a producer says, a particular gesture, or a demonstration of a production process may leave a strong impression on the consumer, confirming a prior judgement she holds about that producer or a pre-existing assumption. That alone is enough for some consumers to conclude whether or not the person is trustworthy.

The consequence of this mode of judgement is that if consumers are not assessing a producer’s credentials through agricultural knowledge, then for producers the basis on which they build a reputation in the market is not entirely rooted in production technique either, but on the personal image they project in these particular settings.

●Farm machinery like this tractor always draws the eye, and I, along with Tianle, the editor of this article at Foodthink, am no exception.

Wang Xin of Beijing Xiqing Farm has said before that the rhetoric used to describe farming techniques is easy to pick up, but not every farmer who masters the rhetoric can actually put those techniques into practice. Yet at the same time, he feels it is very difficult for consumers to distinguish genuine farming expertise from mere talk.

In other words, PGS is in danger of becoming yet another symbol of information transparency, with the substance of participation diluted. As long as sellers can offer any activity that resembles PGS in form—even if its organisational principles are not participatory in nature, and its purpose is not to facilitate knowledge-sharing—it will still give consumers the impression that “this is PGS,” or lead them to believe they have grasped the knowledge needed to make sound quality judgements and consumer choices. But in the end, the empowerment of both producers and consumers has not been realised. This phenomenon has become increasingly apparent amid the recent boom in short-form video and livestream selling.

●Wang Xin of Xiqing Farm worries that consumers cannot tell rhetoric apart from genuine technique.

V. Is PGS Still Necessary?

Research on alternative food systems has long pointed out that those alternative systems which focus exclusively on food quality are often less resilient than those focused on social relationships. The reason lies in the fact that food quality is such a dynamic concept—its meaning is often dictated by the more powerful players in the market.

What makes PGS alternative is not merely the proposal of different concepts of quality, but that consumption is not its most central purpose. Consumption serves the building of community relationships. We do not participate in PGS purely in order to buy better things; rather, we hope to establish a better relationship between producers and consumers—or between producers and producers, consumers, and social organisations—because we believe that only good relationships can bring good food, and that consumer behaviour should be the daily practice of better relationships.

This is also the case with the ecological agriculture that PGS serves: ecological agriculture exists not merely to produce safe agricultural products, but to foster a harmonious—rather than destructive—relationship between agriculture and the environment.

Participating in alternative food consumption—with PGS as its exemplar—out of a pursuit of wholesome, sustainable relationships with nature and society is fundamentally different from being driven by consumerism. If we no longer consider expanding production scale to be the only thing that matters, if we recognise that our relationships with nature and with other members of society can also be reshaped, we might begin to rethink what consumption is truly for. And PGS offers a window through which to rethink patterns of social relationship.

Foodthink Author

Li Shumeng

PhD in Sociology from Cornell University, USA; Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses primarily on value distribution in food production and the ethics of consumption.

 

 

Editor: Tianle

Published by Foodthink