Growth reaps a bitter harvest

Saleswoman Tang Xiaoqing's checklist includes taking potential buyers of flats on a Guangdong estate currently under construction to see a 1,200-hectare eco-park where they will be able to grow organic fruit and vegetables and catch fish if they become owners - or have management hire local farmers to do the job for them.

'It is a major selling point of our project. People are getting more and more health conscious, especially the well-off. They won't buy a property simply because we have a park for them to grow organic vegetables, but they will appreciate it.'

Using an eco-park as a sweetener attracted the attention of Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences researcher Peng Peng to the project, 60 kilometres northwest of Guangzhou's city centre. 'This sales strategy just highlights how people in Guangdong do not trust the food they buy in the market because of the serious pollution, which has led to contamination of the agricultural land after decades of unchecked urbanisation and industrialisation,' Peng said.

The pollution of arable land had led some middle-class people in Guangzhou and Shenzhen to rent farmland in remote rural areas and hire local farmers to grow organic vegetables for them, Peng said. They would eat only vegetables grown on their own land.

The trend represents a turning point in how the province, and the mainland as a whole, thinks about how to feed itself. A generation ago, most of the population were either farmers or ate food grown nearby. But the drive to industrialisation has put a huge strain on the mainland's farmland. The central government, concerned about food security, has set a minimum national level for the amount of arable land. But local authorities often find it hard to resist the lure of the developer's dollar, just as the dwindling number of farmers would prefer giving up toiling in the fields to take a payout or work in a factory. Such competing forces exist throughout the chain, and the stakes are high.

'The problem is very serious,' said Wang Xiaoying, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' rural development research institute. 'The damage we are doing to agricultural land is permanent. Once concrete is poured on the soil, the land will not be able to revert back to farmland. The loss is forever.'