Week 2 (10-16th, Feb 2014)

■ Work Finished

1. Doing questionnaire survey in Nongfuda Coop and Xinbang Village (where most member of Nongfuda Coop are from).

2. Obtaining the whole set of data that CCAP collected in 2009 (comprehensive data of coops), the whole set of CHIPS data in 2002 round (data of households’ social networks) and the access to the CCRS database (comprehensive data of villages since 2006).

3. Deciding the coop samples in Henan Prov and Shandong Prov.

4. Discussing with Prof Zhou and starting to decide the coop samples in Zhejiang Prov and Shaanxi Prov (no need to visit Zhejiang Univ and Northwest Agriculture & Forestry Univ first).

5. Deciding the coop samples in Shiyan City, Hubei Prov.

■ Work to Do

1. Doing survey in Yongxin Coop in Caidian.

2. Interviewing the leaders of Yongbang village.

3. Discussing the identification of true and false agri coops.

4. Booking the tickets to Shiyan City.

5. Recording the survey data in Excel.

6. Contacting the coop leaders in Henan and Shandong to decide the date to visit.

■ Questions

1. Even though being highly supported, it takes at least one week for us to do the questionnaire survey in Nongfuda Coop and Yongbang Village — we have not done the interview to the village leaders yet. The times we set are often rescheduled for various reasons. This makes me quite worry about whether we can finish the surveys in all six provs in time (I will be back to Dublin in 25th April). If not, one solution is that we collect data from a few very typical coops. To select the typical coops we still visit the coops in the six provs but just do very general surveys first. If so the the empirical research becomes more like case studies. This is the way that the profs I talked with recently suggest. The two doctors with the same situation as me (studying in foreign univs and researching Chinese agri issues) did in this way as well and they use five years to get the degree.

2. To test the village level hypotheses, e.g. the village with higher social capital is more likely to have agri coops, I not only need to measure the social capital of the village which has coops but also need to measure that of the villages without coops (probably those geographically close to the village with coops).　A few questions arise here: (1) what is the criterion to select the villages without coops; (2) how many villages should be selected;  (3) even if we only select two, the work of doing the survey will increase a lot.

3. A lot of researchers argue that most coops in China are not true coops but the companies owned by the leading farmers. The reason is that the leading farmers use the coop to earn money for themselves. An agri coop as its nature should be the entity that does not make profit. The revenue it creates should be distributed among household members. The type of coops this study focuses (farmer led coops) on is closer to but still quite far away from the criterion of true coops set by ICA (International Cooperative Alliance) and China farmers’ coop law. Nevertheless the criterion that Chinese coops should accord with is a highly controversial topic. The coops we are studying have at least three features: (1) they increase the scale of production and gain the economies of scale, (2) there is cooperation between farmers through the essential cooperation is only between the leading farmers, (3) they benefit the incomes of all participant farmers (otherwise they will not be in the coop any more). Based on these, I tend to believe that the current coops are probably on the way to be true coops or other types of entity (e.g. companies).

There may be three ways to solve this problem. (1) Ignore it. Just pretend that the coops we study are true coops. They are called coops. They run in the way as coops in many aspects. This is the way that the doctors I know followed. (2) Create a definition of coops for this study. This definition will be looser than that set by ICA and China farmers’ coop law. The coops that in the between of true coops and companies will be included. In this way, the title and objects to survey do not need to change. But this makes the coops we talk about different from the coops that most international researcher talked about. (3) Change the title and, if not difficult, change the objects to survey a little. E.g. we can change the title into something like “the self-organisation of farm households”, “the agricultural industrialisation based on smallholders farming”. I guess we might need to survey some other forms of farmers economic organisation similar to agri coops as well.

The agri coops we study is quite complicated. It is difficult to give an academic definition to them. I will discuss the difference between coop, general company and partnership company this week.

Abbreviations:

agri — agriculture / agricultural

coop — cooperative

prod — produce / product

prof — professor

prov — province

org — organisation

univ — university

veg — vegetable

Acronyms:

CCAP — Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy

CCRS — Centre for Chinese Rural Studies

CIID — China Institute for Income Distribution

ICA — International Co-operative Alliance