Mechanization outsourcing clusters and division of labor in Chinese agriculture
By Xiaobo Zhang, Jin Yang, T. Reardon. 2017
292 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Most of the poor in the developing countries are smallholder farmers. Improving their productivity is essential for reducing poverty. Despite small landholdings, a high degree of land fragmentation, and rising labor costs, agricultural production in China has steadily increased. If one treats the farm household as the unit of analysis, it would be difficult to explain the conundrum. When seeing agricultural production from the lens of division of labor, the puzzle can be easily solved. In response to rising labor costs, farmers outsource some power-intensive stages of production, such as harvesting, to specialized mechanization service providers, which are often clustered in a few counties and travel throughout the country to harvest crops at very competitive service charges. Through such an arrangement, smallholder farmers can stay viable in agricultural production.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92f7bedafd650d650fd7239852fcfab706a6fe0d
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In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- Rapid transformation of food systems in developing regions: Highlighting the role of agricultural research & innovations (2019, background): “Examples include SME providing mobile combine services for small rice farmers in China (Zhang et al., 2017) and Myanmar (Belton 2017).”
- Viewpoint: The future of work in agri-food (2020, unknown): “” In China, the use of these services has promoted a more efficient division of labor, allowing urban migrants to maintain higher-wage employment off the farm during the planting and harvest seasons (Zhang et al., 2017).”
- Comparative analysis of maize–soybean strip intercropping systems: a review (2018, background): “Moreover, reduced availability of labor and increased urbanization have necessitated the adoption of mechanized agriculture (Van Den Berg et al., 2007; Zhang et al., 2017).”
- The rapid rise of agricultural mechanization in Myanmar (2021, background): “Coupled to Myanmar’s location adjacent to China and Thailand – both major agricultural equipment manufacturers – this ensures direct access to a range of relatively inexpensive ‘off the-shelf’ technologies developed to suit similar agrarian conditions.”