“One family, two systems”: Food safety crisis as a catalyst for agrarian changes in rural China

The political economy of agrarian changes in rural China has attracted much scholarly attention. Yet these studies have placed limited emphasis on the role of food safety crisis, a critical issue that not only motivated consumption changes of urban residents, but also catalyzed a differentiated food production and supply scheme in rural China. Our extensive fieldwork revealed that more than 60% of rural farming households in China are adopting two distinctive farming approaches: conventional production with intensive usage of agrochemicals for selling to the market and ecological production with limited or no usage of agrochemicals for self-consumption, relatives and people with close social ties. This is what we call ‘one family, two systems’. This paper conceptualizes and illustrates the widespread yet rarely discussed phenomenon with specific cases. We argue that ‘one family, two systems’ is farmers' self-protection response to the heightened food safety crisis. It reveals that the access to ecologically produced food in the common phenomenon is determined by farmers' social relations and thus is embedded in local social network. ‘One family, two systems’ fosters agrarian changes in at least two dimensions – the farmer-driven ecologicalization of food production and the re-embedding of food production and consumption in ecological systems and social relations in rural China.