BOOK reviews

Abstract

The Political Economy of Agro-Food Markets in China provides a range of in-depth and specialist analyses of how the markets in China for grain, sugar, beef, pork, cotton, wool, silk, cashmere and biofuels are shaped. The book seeks to theorize how these markets are 'structured by socially constructed sets of institutions ' (p. 27) and to this end further develops ideas originally proposed by Neil Fligstein on the 'architecture' and 'sociology' of markets. It also explores agenda setting for future research on food quality in China.China's food production and food markets are notoriously of global significance and were, in the 1990s and early 2000s in particular, regarded as hugely problematic, for -as Lester Brown famously asked in his 1995 book Who Will Feed China? -this question was underpinned by the facts that China's agriculture used less than 10 per cent of the agricultural area in the world to feed one quarter of the world population, and that urban and infrastructure expansion seemed to be incrementally destroying China's most fertile land. The rapid increase in meat consumption among China's growing middle classes sent shock waves across the globe, as media (inspired by the 2008 global grain price hikes) claimed that the grain-protein conversion rate was driving China on to the world market for grain, with devastating outcomes for global food security.The function of food markets in China has been understudied in terms of the political economy of the reforms that started in 1978, and the research that does exist needs to be further synthesized and theorized in order to bring out new significant findings that can inform our understanding of future directions for China's economy, social organization, labour market and demography. Current urbanization directly hinges on how rural people change from food producers into urban consumers.The word agro-food in the title signals at first glance the path from the field and stable to the human mouth. Yet five of the nine product-related chapters are on non-food products: cotton, wool, silk and cashmere, as well as biofuels. Apart from stretching the meaning of 'agro-food markets' a bit too far for my taste, this choice makes the book more complex and fragmented than it could have been. Even so, one has to admit that these commodities are joined by the hip to food due to the WTO, the FAO and the remits of the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Development and Reform Commission, as well as the perspective of the producers.The 'social construction of markets', inspired by Neil Fligstein's 'institutional orders' and 'institutional relationships', is laid out by Andy Smith in chapter one. Chapter two by Louis Augustin-Jean, on 'food quality', also a theoretical chapter, examines perceptions of food commodities in relation to nutrition and health, but within a fundamentally different conceptual framework. Both chapters could have been gainfully integrated with little effort to make the structure of the book smoother.The main thrust of the book is, in my view, spot...