Subsistence Solidarity and the Extension of Trust: Moral Economies of Organic Farming in Northern China

Urban Farm DB summary

This article focuses on organic farming, which has grown in response to unsafe food on the Chinese market, based on ethnographic fieldwork at one such farm in northern China. While the farm's Community Supported Agriculture model relies on establishing personal trust with member households, the entire organic farming project is shown to be undergirded by strong expressions of solidarity with conventional farmers. The article proposes an extended concept of moral economies to capture the coexistence of differential care alongside horizontal solidarities within contemporary China's moral landscape.