Understand Rural Fundamentals Before Talking Climate Change

Editor’s Note

This year is set to become the hottest on record. Yet at the recently concluded COP29, nations continued to bicker over climate finance, repeatedly stalling negotiations. The climate finance gap for agriculture, in particular, is enormous.

When we talk about agriculture responding to climate change, what exactly are we talking about? Associate Professor Liu Juan of the College of Humanities and Development Studies at China Agricultural University has long conducted fieldwork in rural areas across the country, examining farmers’ livelihoods and environmental justice through the lenses of environmental sociology and political ecology. She is also one of the co-authors of the 2023 publication Rural Revitalisation from the Farmers’ Perspective. In recent years, she has turned her attention to the intersection of climate change and rural development, exploring what kind of responses farmers and rural communities need in the face of climate change. How can we move beyond treating climate as a siloed issue and build climate resilience in rural areas at a fundamentally deeper level?

Below is her conversation with Foodthink.

● November 2024: Liu Juan (second from left) takes part in a full-area field survey in Yi County, Hebei, conducted by the Agrarian Governance and Development research team led by Professor Ye Jingzhong (sixth from right). Source: WeChat Official Account of the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University

I. Growing Rice on Cracked Land

Foodthink: You’ve been conducting fieldwork at the grassroots level in rural areas for years. Is there a memorable climate change story that has stayed with you?

Liu Juan: This summer, we launched a case-study project examining farmers’ awareness of climate change and their adaptive capacity, and I focused on several sites in Hebei and Chongqing. When we visited Chongqing, it was scorching—nearly 40 degrees Celsius of relentless sun—and afterwards the city endured the prolonged heatwave and drought that many people have heard about. Actually, Chongqing suffered a severe drought as far back as 2022. At that time, the entire Yangtze River basin was badly affected. Land transfer in Chongqing is extraordinarily thorough—over 90% of farmland has been transferred. Only a very small number of farming households still work small plots. These plots aren’t really suitable for transfer, so they’ve been left for the owners themselves. After the drought, the cracked soil couldn’t hold water, and following the severe drought in 2022, these small-scale farmers largely stopped growing rice.

Foodthink: So who is growing rice, then?

Liu Juan: The village cooperative. They are required to meet a target area for staple grain production. When we did our fieldwork this year, we learned that in the spring of 2023, the cooperative used machinery to break up the cracked soil each time there was even a light rain, trying to create a stable, crack-free surface that could retain water. But a single pass couldn’t repair the cracks, so they had to keep watching for rain and go back for another round of tilling every time water was available. Otherwise, even if it rained later or they irrigated, the soil still wouldn’t hold moisture. In areas dominated by mountains and hills, the operational costs are extremely high, and the returns on agricultural products don’t necessarily cover those costs. So this thing people call “coping” or “adaptation” is really not easy at all.

● April 2024: A severe drought in Yunnan left the rice terraces in Mojiang badly cracked. Photo: Yunnan Sili Centre

II. Social Mechanisms Are Needed to Address the Varied Impacts of Climate Change

Foodthink: That sounds alarming. From what you’ve observed in other parts of the country, is this situation widespread?

Liu Juan: Climate change moves in different directions, and its impacts take different forms from place to place. In our research, we selected three sites in a county in Hebei to observe and understand how different types of cropping systems and agricultural producers vary in their responses to climate change. The related report is expected to be published in April next year.

This county is very close to Beijing. One of the sites we chose is a village we visited during another research project a few years ago. It’s a very traditional farming community—many of the working-age people have gone to work elsewhere, and those who remain in the village year-round are mostly elderly. The village also went through the targeted poverty alleviation campaign. Since that first visit, we’ve arranged for a postgraduate student to live in the village every year, helping with various community activities while also conducting research. They’ve all produced excellent dissertations.

During the 31 July flood last year, one of our students was in the village. He experienced the entire process—from early warnings and hazard mitigation through evacuation, temporary resettlement and post-disaster recovery. The government followed up with a great deal of top-down coordination, for instance requiring the village to designate specific locations for safe evacuation and mark them clearly. But this was clearly only in response to the flood; there’s been no consideration yet of uncertainty or the diverse risks posed by climate change. When we visited the village recently, we found that the Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and the Water Resources Bureau had each issued disaster prevention and mitigation pamphlets—different cover colours, but essentially the same content.

● After the flooding, a river bridge was severely damaged.

Foodthink: Beyond the government, can other social actors take part in the response to climate change?

Liu Juan: Yes, and this is one reason I’ve focused on social organisations—not specific institutions, but the broader question of how we might build social mechanisms to respond to climate change. At the societal level, how exactly should we be dealing with climate change? We may need solutions that go beyond schemes for managing flash floods or preventing dam failures. We need something far more comprehensive—a whole set of social mechanisms, because the impacts of climate change don’t come in just one form.

For example, the impact of the 31 July torrential rain and resulting flood on this village was primarily damage to roads and bridges, because the crops are mainly grown on hillsides—at most a small plot was lost, so the damage wasn’t too great. Unlike in the plains, where standing water can inundate entire fields. It was actually in early August this year that the village experienced a windstorm. The maize hadn’t fully matured, and more than half of it was knocked down. A lot of the maize rotted in the field—it was difficult even to walk through it, and the losses were quite severe. Agricultural insurance was available the previous two years, but because farmers felt it was of no use and they struggled to get compensation, almost nobody signed up this year.

In another township we visited, they grow waxy maize for export to South Korea. It’s harvested relatively early, so it was entirely unaffected. Of course, it may also be to do with the location—the wind wasn’t as strong there, and crops that hadn’t been harvested yet didn’t suffer similar wind damage either. Interestingly, agricultural insurance uptake in that township was actually much higher than in the previous two years. Every community has its own small-scale micro-environment, which shapes how people adapt to climate change on the ground.

What can social organisations do about climate change in rural areas? Foodthink is conducting a survey of NGOs nationwide. Please click here to complete the Survey on Action Pathways of Chinese Rural Social Organisations in Responding to Climate Change and help advance rural climate action.

Foodthink: This variability isn’t confined to the community level. When you look at the individual level, a farmer’s production practices and livelihood strategy also shape their personal climate resilience.

Liu Juan: Yes. But I feel that, overall, whether at the level of individual households or of villages, rural communities have very limited capacity to respond to climate change on their own.

We have another postgraduate student who lived in a village for six months, researching transport and infrastructure. The 31 July torrential rain last year destroyed many roads and bridges in that village. But the village has almost no collective economy, so repair work depends mainly on post-disaster recovery projects funded by the Water Resources Bureau and others.

We also interviewed a farm owner who runs an eco-park. The 2021 flood damaged some of the greenhouse structures in the park where strawberries, melons and other fruits were grown. He raised funds to rebuild them in 2022, but a worse flood struck in the summer of 2023, and he no longer dares to rebuild. In his own words: ‘What if another big flood comes and washes it all away again? (Unless) God could tell me which days it will rain and which days it won’t—or at least what time of day it will rain, that would be good enough.’ The rare snowfall that winter also collapsed some of the eco-park’s structures, which remain unrepaired to this day. So scaling up and protected cultivation aren’t necessarily ideal strategies for mitigating climate risk either.

● Visible damage can be seen in the upper-right corner of the image to greenhouse structures the farm owner no longer dares to rebuild.

Foodthink: So do smallholders who make less heavy investment in infrastructure suffer smaller losses?

Liu Juan: You can’t generalise. We get the sense that there aren’t really good options at the household level—everyone is calculating inputs versus outputs. Take the traditional farming village we just discussed. They have some newly levelled fields on the hillsides, and water pipes and towers were installed as part of the infrastructure. But even during the spring drought, when planting had to be delayed, the farmers almost never use them. If a single household opens the sluice, they have no idea when the water will reach their plot, and the costs of water and electricity are too high. So they’d rather wait and plant later—worst case, they get a smaller yield.

For experienced smallholders, “farming at the mercy of the sky” isn’t passive resignation—it’s a strategy of minimising input. Sometimes they’ll glance at the weather forecast and do what little they can. But when a real disaster strikes, they may do nothing at all, because the cost is too high and it might not even help.

Some farmers switch crops. This village has experienced crop conversion before—shifting from irrigated fields planted with wheat to more drought-tolerant crops such as maize, peanuts and sweet potatoes. But on the whole, what drives this change isn’t just climate change; it could also be the outflow of labour.

The adjustments in cropping patterns we’re seeing now inevitably carry the influence of climate change, but it may not be the direct or primary factor. In our fieldwork for Rural Revitalisation from the Farmers’ Perspective, we found that—farmers identified labour shortages as the single biggest constraint on agricultural production, with natural disasters coming second.

● Based on fieldwork across ten villages in five provinces, Liu Juan’s Agrarian Governance and Development research team at the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University, published Rural Revitalisation from the Farmers’ Perspective (two volumes) in 2023.

III. Labour Shortages and the Economics of Farming

Foodthink: With rural hollowing taking hold, if the family’s income depends mainly on younger members working in town, then older people do as little as they can on the land. Compared with grand-sounding climate adaptation measures, cutting back on inputs matters more to them.

Liu Juan: The elderly can scatter seeds at a gentler pace, harvest some peanuts or sweet potatoes in the autumn, or grow a few fruit or nut trees at their own speed—no frantic races to plant or harvest. In a sense, this is all a form of adaptation to the current labour structure.

Foodthink: You mentioned earlier that in Chongqing, after land transfer and drought, the smallholders stopped growing rice. So what do they grow instead?

Liu Juan: Those smallholders still working the land are older and simply don’t have the capacity to operate machinery the way a cooperative can—tilling and harrowing the soil multiple times to create a stable, water-retaining system suitable for rice. They probably just switch to drought-tolerant crops like maize.

● Chongqing farmers harvesting in the autumn under a blazing sun.

Foodthink: If the cost of mechanised operations in a cooperative is so high, who ultimately bears that burden?

Liu Juan: Cooperatives and cooperative unions are actually under enormous pressure to operate. Land transfer involves paying rent and so on. Fortunately, some villages haven’t adopted the transfer model but use what’s called land trusteeship—essentially entrusting someone to look after the land so that it’s planted and doesn’t lie fallow. Farmers who take this approach don’t press hard on rent, so the cooperative’s financial pressure is relatively lower. Otherwise, when an extreme weather event hits, the cooperative could suffer losses beyond imagination.

In the past, when we conducted fieldwork in areas like Guangxi and Yunnan, we found that some places grow cash crops—bananas, dragon fruit and the like—often as monocultures, a process that degrades the soil to some extent. So whoever contracts the land has to pay rent regardless. But back then, fruit profits were still high enough that even with typhoons and the like, the balance over a few years still yielded a reasonable return. For staple food crops, however, there simply isn’t that profit margin.

Foodthink: Indeed, when discussing the impact of climate change on farmers, there are many dimensions to consider—not just the scale of cultivation, but also the crop, the level of corresponding policy support, and the farmer’s own livelihood model, among other things. So in academia, how do people look at the impacts of and responses to climate change alongside the very real, very hard bottlenecks in rural development?

Liu Juan: Looking at Chinese academia, research that brings together climate change and rural transformation is still rather scarce, at least for now. Studies that discuss it purely from an agricultural angle have become somewhat more common in recent years. Yet rural China is undergoing tremendous transformation. In the Introduction to Rural Revitalisation course I teach, there’s a dedicated chapter examining the Chinese countryside as it is today (in the 2020s). Because I sometimes read my students’ writing about rural China, and it reads as though it’s still the last century—From the Soil—the countryside of that era, perhaps those assumptions and analytical frames have become ingrained by habit. But the countryside today has genuinely undergone a dramatic transformation.

IV. What’s Changing Isn’t Just the Climate but also the Countryside

Foodthink: If you had to sum up today’s dramatically transformed countryside in just a few keywords, what would they be?

Liu Juan: Agriculture, the countryside and farmers can be three distinct threads running through the problem of agrarian transition.

For example, look at rural areas from the human angle and you can observe two trends: ageing and an overall outflow of population. In terms of macro statistics, we used to speak of 900 million farmers in rural China; now the rural resident population is under 500 million. That is a seismic shift. Yet many studies don’t seem to have incorporated this enormous transformation into their analyses—we still haven’t properly explored what has actually been happening during the process.

From the perspective of who is farming: who is working the land now? Who is still willing to farm? Who is capable of farming? Farmers’ sense of identity has shifted considerably too. What hasn’t changed is that it’s still largely the same group of people tilling the soil—they’ve simply grown older. But who, today, is actually willing to get involved in rural areas? The targeted poverty alleviation campaign was in effect a social engineering project that mobilised enormous external forces to enter rural areas, intervening in and reshaping them on a massive scale.

Foodthink: A great deal of that money has gone into hardware, too. The improvement of rural infrastructure is plain for all to see, but we’ve also come across infrastructure projects with very low utility or even a waste of funds. When we were doing fieldwork in Shanxi, we came across an absurd situation. The old pit latrines could at least have the waste collected and composted, but after the toilet upgrade, the sewage has to be pumped out and centrally treated. In some cases it’s purely a vanity project: a toilet seat placed on top of a pit latrine with no connection to a water and drainage system—farmers can’t get used to it at all.

Liu Juan: I feel the same way. When it comes to intervention in rural areas, I’ve become increasingly cautious myself. I’ve been involved in evaluating projects or conducting case-study research covering various kinds of industrial projects and many rural construction schemes. But more often than not, we find that development interventions come carrying a well-intentioned “wish to improve” things.

Especially in the past decade or so, many projects have poured huge sums into construction, only to find it extremely difficult to put the facilities into actual use—let alone make full use of them and let ordinary people benefit. Some have been simply abandoned. The more you see, the more you feel a sense of futility and meaninglessness. For instance, in some remote mountain townships, a centralised wastewater treatment facility will be built—but in mountainous terrain, how do you collect wastewater that is so scattered, one household at a time? Meanwhile, operating it requires technical expertise, staffing and ongoing funding. So once built, these facilities face an operational impasse. In some places, the township government refuses to take them over after completion—nobody wants to take responsibility.

V. Bridging Disciplinary Divides to Tackle Climate Change Together

Foodthink: You mentioned that there’s very little research combining climate change with rural transformation. Why is that?

Liu Juan: One possible reason is disciplinary fragmentation. Many people in the natural sciences and economics study climate change, but there’s a lack of attention to what’s actually happening at the micro level and to the social factors at play. Students and teachers in the social sciences, on the other hand, seem reluctant to engage with climate or environmental issues—perhaps feeling they don’t understand them or can’t make sense of those domains.

At present, the specialist community in China paying meaningful attention to this intersection is small, centring mainly on environmental sociology and political ecology. In environmental sociology, the focus on climate change still tends to lean towards purely sociological or political analysis, with environmental and climatic factors more often serving as background. Political ecology is more concerned with the interplay between social structures, power relations and environmental problems; domestically it remains a small, emerging field. If you search on CNKI, you’ll find some literature reviews on political ecology, mostly by Marxist scholars, along with anthropologists and geographers surveying overseas political-ecology literature. Overall, empirical research output in Chinese in this area is still quite limited.

Since last year, a political ecology workshop I’ve been attending has brought together a group of young researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, with hopes of forming a new research community. Climate change and agrarian transition are among the most important themes. We hope that over the next three to five years there can be some breakthroughs—translating and introducing the major political ecology schools of thought, mapping the literature, and developing a political-ecology analytical framework for agriculture and rural China.

● The second Political Ecology Workshop, co-organised by Liu Juan, is about to convene.

Foodthink: There are an enormous number of papers on the impact of climate change on agriculture, but very few that examine how it affects smallholder livelihoods. And we’ve noticed that even where some fieldwork has been done, there’s a tendency to confirm what’s already known, with a shortage of practical, actionable recommendations.

Liu Juan: The macro-level, quantifiable questions are actually fairly clear by now. What may be needed now is more micro-level narrative—presenting the complexity of the issue and identifying where the key problems really lie. So fundamental research itself is important.

I’ve noticed that international organisations and rural social organisations don’t pay much attention to the research phase before a project gets under way; they focus more on short-term interventions and specific activities that are visible and amenable to quantitative evaluation. If solid prior research has already been done and you can build directly on those findings, then of course there’s nothing wrong with that. But when it’s a brand-new intervention project, understanding the fundamental nature of the problem through research—judging what kind of problem it is and what the key factors are—matters enormously. It helps avoid treating the symptom rather than the cause, and avoids tokenistic training sessions, workshops and interventions.

Foodthink: So how should social organisations and researchers interact?

Liu Juan: I believe rigorous research work is essential. There’s a real need to combine academic research with practical action, and NGOs, too, need to strengthen their partnerships with research institutions, ensuring that the nature of the problem is properly understood before any intervention or action begins.

For example, sometimes the root of the problem lies at the institutional level. In that case, we may first need to push for a solution at that level through policy consultation and dialogue, so the key to action isn’t necessarily to intervene directly with individuals. Interventions aimed at individuals might solve a specific problem to some small degree, but the overall impact could be very limited.

Sometimes the action required is advocacy—getting the issue on the public agenda, presenting it through the media or other channels to build public awareness, so that a better overall effect can be achieved. In reality, there are indeed organisations or projects that leap into action and intervention before they’ve figured out what the problem actually is or how best to understand it—and that’s exactly the kind of thing that all too easily generates new “problems”.

Foodthink: Could you give an example of a situation where the policy problem needs to be addressed first?

Liu Juan: For instance, when it comes to agriculture responding to climate change and building smallholder resilience, our fieldwork has found that strengthening the adaptive capacity of individual households has rather limited significance. The focus may need to shift to a community or social-ecological system as a whole, which involves coordination and collaboration at a higher level as well as a great deal of specific, granular work at a lower one.

Take agricultural insurance as another example. Given the high costs of grain production, low returns, and the generally weak willingness to grow grain, should the risk costs inherent in growing the main staple crops fall on the individual farmer? Or rather, what should the accountability mechanism look like for ensuring food security? If we want farmers to remain willing to work the land—and truly keep farming—don’t we need policy-level safeguards to ensure they don’t panic, whether the year brings favourable weather or is dogged by frequent extremes?

And then there’s the labour question. In many places now, it’s the elderly doing the farming. Even when younger people are at home, the real fieldwork still falls to the older generation, and they’re the only ones who truly care about what happens on the land. If we harbour the idealistic hope of training them to adopt more ecological methods of growing and rearing, some of those measures actually mean a greater labour input—they’d find it even harder, and the practice all the less sustainable. So it’s not that they don’t know they should reduce their use of chemical fertiliser, pesticide, herbicide, and so on; it’s a question of whether they can. From an intervention standpoint, what’s more needed may be ecological farming methods that cut down on labour and make the work a little easier on those who do it.

● In August 2023, at the Sustainable Food and Farming Media Workshop hosted by Foodthink, Liu Juan introduced her research to more than thirty journalists and media practitioners.

VI. What to Do and What Not to Do

Foodthink: It sounds like the smallholders still working the land are already carrying a weight that ought never to have fallen on them. What outside actors should be doing is lightening their load—not bolting on yet another layer of armour in the name of so-called climate adaptation.

Liu Juan: A few years ago, when we were doing fieldwork in Shaanxi, we came across a similar case. Local programmes—including poverty alleviation schemes—had created jobs that absorbed a large number of women working locally or nearby, so they could earn a modest income close to home. From the standpoint of women’s economic independence, that was a good thing. But the women’s own feeling was largely one of exhaustion. They might work ten hours during the day and pocket a bit of extra income, yet the men still had to go away for work. So the household farmwork and all the domestic chores were still waiting for them, and they had to figure out how to carve out time between it all. Many women told us they felt utterly worn out—it didn’t feel at all like the “good life” they had been promised.

Some measures encouraged elderly people to raise pigs in the hope of helping them qualify for programme incentives and subsidies and the like. The organisations driving these projects may well have given little thought at the time to labour input, real capabilities, or the risks posed by climate and the market.

Foodthink: In some places, government and non-governmental organisations have promoted integrated programmes combining cattle rearing, biogas production, and composting, on the idea that they would not only raise farmers’ income but also deliver climate mitigation and adaptation benefits. But when meat prices fell, those programmes naturally went under. It’s also a reminder: unless you situate smallholder farmers within the regional—and even global—economic and political landscape and analyse where they actually stand, the project may simply be a short-term exercise in chasing the incidental while neglecting the essential.

Liu Juan: Yes. Approaching the issue from the standpoint of environmental and social justice might enable a more precise intervention. The impacts of climate change and the costs of adaptation are distributed with extreme unevenness across different groups and regions.

Tackling climate change requires not only the continued efforts of natural scientists but also interdisciplinary perspectives such as political ecology, if we are to address the question of climate justice at the societal level. In broad terms, the relatively vulnerable are bearing, unequally, both the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, yet their room for action is severely constrained. Within their own autonomous scope, the climate mitigation and adaptation measures they can actually take are very few.

There are scholars and social organisations working hard to uncover the strength and wisdom at the grassroots level, but we must not romanticise local knowledge and grassroots wisdom so as to overlook the inherent nature of climate change itself and the inequalities baked into social structures.

Foodthink: Yes. We’ve noticed the same thing. The relationship between climate change and agriculture, farmers, and rural life is so complex, yet many interventions can only address one facet of it. As you put it earlier: “treating the symptom rather than the cause.” In the end, that all too easily generates new problems.

Liu Juan: In truth, we haven’t yet done a good job of untangling the multiple, complex relationships between climate change and agriculture, rural areas, and farmers—or between climate change and agrarian transition as a whole. The result is that many interventions end up being muddled or even self-contradictory. For instance, mitigation, adaptation, and straightforward disaster prevention and preparedness may each point towards different problems, different subjects, and different logics of causation. At the practical level, that means confronting a host of dilemmas and conflicts.

Foodthink: This may also have something to do with the generally limited awareness of climate change across Chinese society.

Liu Juan: Indeed, the absence of environmental and climate education is another problem. In a discussion last year, for example, we touched on the gap in climate awareness between urban and rural areas. We’ve grown so accustomed to a calm, stable working and living environment—accustomed to the convenience, comfort, and cleanliness of everyday life—that we rarely stop to think about the material and social conditions that underpin all of it, or about the hardship and sacrifice unfolding either right beside us or far away. Nor do we see the countless threads connecting environmental and climate issues to each one of us. Under such circumstances, it is extremely difficult to build a consensus for action at the societal level.

Interviewee:

Liu Juan

Associate Professor and doctoral supervisor at the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University. Her research centres on political ecology, environmental sociology, and agrarian politics and development. She currently serves as Associate Editor of the SSCI-indexed journal World Development and guest co-editor of special issues.

▼ The Harvest Festival, opening this Friday in Guangzhou, is a rare public event in China that brings together farmers, consumers, scholars, social organisations, and the media to explore food and agriculture as a common subject. Climate change has been a topic at nearly every edition in recent years. Click the image for event details.

Unless otherwise indicated, all images are provided by the interviewees.

Written by: Kong Lingyu, Qi Boshu

Edited by: Tianle