Abstract
The upland agriculture in Southwest China is undergoing a transformation from subsistence to industrial agriculture, which is accompanied by differentiation among farmers. The industrialisation of farming is best understood as an ongoing process rather than an achieved structure, and the industrial and subsistence forms of production are combined in complex ways during transformation. The unit of analysis shifts downwards to the production unit, namely, the ‘form of production’, which is observed at the household level. This study aims to describe the dynamics of the transformation from subsistence to industrial agriculture in Southwest China and the hybridized forms of production that lie between the two extremes. Empirical observations on the transformation of farming in Southwest China, specifically the circumstances of smallholder farmers and local farming systems in the process of industrialisation and farmers’ reasons for their resistance and persistence in traditional farming, are documented and analysed. Using data collected for 2008 and 2019, this study considers the form of production observed from production methods and dynamic farming structures to explore how farmers’ motivations and structural forces clash and interact at the farm level in the commoditization of production and to understand farmers’ autonomy within relational contexts. The study measures the resilience of farmers’ decision-making in production through their space for manoeuvring, which depends on their ability and the conditions to obtain alternative solutions at various stages of production, reflecting varying degrees of autonomy from the dominant development trajectory. The study also reveals that the rapid reduction in the cultivated area of cereals is closely related to the acceleration of agricultural industrialisation. Farmers who join the industry are systematically pressured to compete with no economic cushion when vertically organized commodity chains have shaped local production. Their forms of production are interlocked through adjacent land and crops, and the widespread domino effect has reduced farmers’ room to manoeuvre, limited farmers’ choices in production, and brought vulnerability to local farming systems. Moreover, the transformation towards sustainability has been fragmented and inconsistent.
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Notes
The first, second, third, and fourth digits in the farmer’s code from left to right represent the county, township, village, and household codes, respectively. The county code is 1–6 (corresponding to County A, B, C, D, E, F), and the township, village, and household codes are all 1–3 (some households code up to 4). The questionnaire code for 2009 is distinguished from 2019 by a ‘C’ before the four digits.
100 RMB, approximately 13.97 USD.
One mu is approximately equal to 667 square metres or one-fifteenth of a hectare.
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Acknowledgements
I am especially grateful to Dr. Shu Zhang for his assistance in data illustration. I would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China under Grant 22BSH156.
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The author would like to acknowledge that this work is an expansion of the author’s previous work first reported briefly in Chinese in the Open Times [the full reference is: Li, J. (2023). Evolution and Persistence: The Transformation of Upland Agriculture in Southwest China. Open Times, 1, 172–188].
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Li, J. Tracing the restructuring and industrialisation of upland agriculture in Southwest China, 2008 – 2019. Food Sec. 17, 603–623 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-025-01534-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-025-01534-8