Agricultural diversification and expansion

For those staying on the farm during the drought, diversification within agriculture was a well-accepted option. In Shijia, the onset of drought encouraged people to raise more goats and plant less land with tobacco, because compared with growing tobacco, goat-raising is more water and labour-efficient. According to Shijia villagers, herding

goats was not such labour-intensive work and the goats generally could feed themselves in the forest surrounding their village for most of the year. From late autumn to early spring, the driest seasons, they were able to grow drought-resistant vegetables, such as corn and melons, as supplementary food to feed the goats while in the pen.

Over time, however, it became more and more difficult for households to engage in both tobacco production and goat raising at the same time due to household labourers’ outmigration and a consequent shortage of labour. In the early years of drought, about 25 of the 31 households grew tobacco and less than 15 households raised goats. However, by the end of 2014, the number of households raising goats had increased to 25, while only half the households still grew tobacco. The result was that nearly half of the land in the village, particularly land in areas where roads and water facilities were in poor condition or non-existent, was not planted. None of the households had given or subcontracted out land or received land from others, as all households in the village were faced with the same problem of labour shortage.

In contrast, in Baijia village, where there is a river nearby and the irrigation system is well developed, rather than abandoning tobacco fields, local residents expanded tobacco production during and in response to the drought.

As mentioned in Chapter 2, tobacco is a monopoly industry in China, and so villagers’ choices in tobacco production are strictly constrained by government policy. Tobacco farmers are required to be licensed, produce according to quotas and sell their output to state procurement stations. In the period in which I conducted research, the average land which could be included in the local tobacco company’s plan was less than 5 mu per household. Meanwhile, according to the villagers, the locally specified type of tobacco leaf required by the tobacco company was very difficult to grow, especially during drought, when the leaves were prone to disease, due to insufficient irrigation water. Between 2009 and 2014, a large proportion of tobacco leaves withered before harvest and the rest were generally poor quality after processing. Since tobacco leaves are sorted into grades, with the highest grade sold at about ten times the price of the lowest one, villagers suffered a great reduction in income during these years.

Even when farmers were able to maintain the quality of their produce, they faced problems, as the grading process was based on the subjective judgement of the

company’s staff. It was very common to hear villagers complain that the price of their products was more closely related to their personal relations with staff working at the tobacco station than the quality of the leaves. Furthermore, the decrease in quality and productivity caused by drought in many cases contributed to households’ failure to fulfil the requirements of the company, which meant that the following year, the tobacco company or its local agents reduced the area of land contracted or in extreme cases, did not renew the contract.

To deal with this, on the one hand, local farmers mobilised their social connections, particularly their connections with village cadres, to get as much land included in tobacco growing as possible. On the other hand, they used the small parcels of land easily accessed by tobacco company staff to grow the specified type of tobacco leaf, but planted more profitable types of tobacco leaf on larger, secret plots of mountainous land, which were unknown and invisible to company staff. They then sold the produce illegally to traffickers or to outside tobacco stations, with whom they had connections. It should be mentioned that rather than being triggered by the recent drought, this kind of non-contract private production and illegal sale has existed since the implementation of the dual control policy in 1997 (see Chapter 2). During the drought, however, households depending on tobacco production and sales as their main source of income made more effort to further increase their income from illegal production and sales.

Despite being quite familiar with this situation, the officials from the local tobacco company and government combating illegal sales of tobacco were not always strict in carrying out their job. They often acquiesced in farmers’ non-contract production and cross-regional selling as well as the activities of private tobacco traffickers, sometimes even themselves becoming actively involved in purchasing the non-contract produce to meet their own production quotas. The main reason was that the practice offered a certain degree of flexibility. During the drought, as with farmers in Baijia, villagers in many other affected regions also expanded production as a coping strategy. Local production therefore greatly exceeded the contract requirement. According to an official from the county tobacco company, they turned a blind eye to illegal sales because such

sales were an important channel for absorbing the surplus, and thus, maintained social stability in the tobacco-growing regions during the drought.

Consequently, as long as the “secret tobacco land” was not found during company staff’s routine inspections, farmers were allowed to keep it. This explains why, at the beginning of my fieldwork in Baijia, villagers were quite reluctant to talk about the exact amount of land they planted with tobacco as well as their income from tobacco production, and were very unwilling to show me the location of their land. After they confirmed that I was neither an official from the local tobacco company nor a government employee, and I was not likely to reveal their secret production to the company, they allowed me to follow them to their household tobacco fields. The fields were small plots spread through the mountains, a fact unlikely to be known or discovered by outsiders who are unfamiliar with the environment and community. Villagers usually completed their work of growing seedlings and transplanting on contracted land first, to comply with the tobacco company’s strict regulations, meanwhile growing non-contracted seedlings and some wheat for livestock feed on their secret land. After the company finished inspecting the contracted land, farmers harvested the wheat and started to transplant their private tobacco on the secret land. Although growing the more profitable type of tobacco brought more cash income to the household, it was still very difficult for a household to sell out all the produce, particularly for ordinary villagers with limited social connections with those able to put them in touch with buyers. Most of them could only count on traffickers who generally did their purchasing in the village after the harvest of the contracted produce. Every year, large numbers of tobacco leaves remained unsaleable. Farmers had to use them as fertilizer to nurture their land for crop plantation in the following year, despite having spent most of their time and energy in the previous year growing and processing those leaves.

2. Household-level factors shaping experiences of and