Farewell to China - the final flashback

In the final leg of our China GFC and found ourselves in Beijing.

Visiting Tiananmen Square was quite moving. All the Nuffield team clearly recall the dramatic pictures of the tank and the defiant protestors; it was surreal to think that was the place it all happened. Surveylance cameras sat on the surrounding rooftops making them look like prickly hedgehogs and security personnel were prominent. I guess the Tiananmen Square represents western view of the struggle for freedom of speech in China. 

Interestingly, we spoke to a twenty three year old Chinese expat who had returned briefly to China. They knew nothing about the political unrest in Tiananmen Square until they travelled overseas recently. Right next to the Square there is the Forbidden City, an ancient fortress that speaks of the former glory days of previous Chinese Emperors and Dynasties. The City itself was build around the time that William and his invading Norman army won the Battle of Hastings. It is beautiful and impressive.

Speaking of impressive, we travelled to the Great Wall. It is hard to describe how magnificent it is; words do not do it justice. It is 21,000kms long with guard towers regularly dotted along the way, weaving and winding up steep mountain sides and along ridge lines. All I could think is that the Mongols must have been pretty bad neighbours to go to that extent to shut them out.

The next day we left for USA. China was fun, challenging, interesting, inspiring, frustrating and confusing. It didn't disappoint.

Porky Torky: Memories Of China

Porky Torky: Memories Of China: Have a look at a few short minutes from the Chinese leg of the Nuffield global focus.

Flashback - China needs people with skills

China's agricultural production is increasing dramatically and often, they are using cutting edge technology to help them.

We visited a tissue culture laboratory developing new potato strains, a 10,000ha vegetable farm with incredible computerised logistics systems, a state of the art milk processing plant, a cashmere mill using goat and camel fibre to produce high end knitware and duvets, to name a few places.

 China is investing heavily in infrastructure and there are some impressive farming operations however their farm performance, once you drilled down a bit, left something to be desired. The big gap that I saw is in the management capability area. There are plenty of workers and there are pretty advanced corporate management structures, but the interface between the two is lacking. This will take quite some time to address and offers an opportunity for NZ and our farm management expertise. China has many mouths to feed and people to clothe.

I don't see them being a threat as a agricultural exporter in the foreseeable future. In fact, there is a forecast labour shortage as the "One Child" policy works through the age brackets and China will soon become an aging population.

Buy local focus in California

We have visited a number of farm types in a busy schedule around central California.  There is alot of focus on the buy local story though one grower made an interesting comment that 'buy local' trumps 'organic' produce.

We had a long discussion about this and the consensus about both organic and buy local is about the flavour of the food; the freshness.  My view is that the organic supply chain tend to be shorter than conventional supply chains and therefor tend to be fresher and more flavoursome.

The conventional chains source fresh produce and fruit well before it is fully ripe in order to freight and have it on the shelf when it is ripe but this can be at the expense of the flavour; this is why we all like home grown food.  There are a number of lessons and opportunities in this.

Flashback - Hong Kong

An early start to Hong Kong saw us arrive for time for a few meetings. Rabobank hosted us on the 32nd floor of their down town building which gave us spectacular views and a high level understanding of China today and tomorrow.

It sets the scene nicely for the next ten days as we have travel across China. We were told that the focus of Chinese food and fibre policy is ' In Asia for Asia'. There are high levels of concern around food security amongst Chinese and saw some interesting consumer data of milk consumption after the San Lu milk scandal.

Flashback- Kaifeng

We spent a couple of days in central China at Kaifeng.Our first destination was a seed dressing manufaturer.  They import globally and have a tie up with one of our Nuffield team.  The scale of the operation was imprseeive with mass production of various items of seed dressing plant.  I can easily see how our manufacturing struggles against this scale of operation.  Once again, the use of labour instead of capital provided the competitive edge over  western based business.  The cost of wages are sneaking up within China so it will be interesting to see how long thi competitive edge can be maintained.

.We stopped off at a wheat cropping farm and had a look at the harvest in progress.  China prduces 90M tonnnes of wheat each year with most of it grown on small scall farms around 2 - 3 Mou (pronounced 'moo' and there are 15 Mou per hetare).  Every person in China has a small land holding and in the case of grain production get the harvest in by use of the local contractor who gathers the harvest by  small combine harvester.  The person then dries the grain on the side of the road (or in the middle of the road in some cases) .  It is amazing that 90M tonnes of grain are produced in this ay but it works somehow.  To give you a sense of scale, Australia produces around 25M tonnes of grain per year.

In the USA

A hop over the Pacific Ocean took us to Califiornia and the satrt of the US leg of our tour.  We started at a Farmers Market in Marin County.  There we saw a large and successful market which provides the opportunity for producers and consumers to meet face to face.  It triggered some further tining I have been working through since the March leg of the Nuffield tour.

 That is the role of the realtionship of the consumer with thier food.  Part of this is the relationship of the consumer with the person that grows their food; the farmer.  They have a few bumper stickers which I liked such as"Don't buy your food from a stranger" and 'I know my farmer, I know my food".  The provenance and the story associated with the food that people eat is becoming increasingly more important, especially to high end consumers.  This is where our food needs to be pitched and our marketing should tell that story.  There is an emerging challenge for NZ in this movement because it is also a buy local story too, so we need to think through what that could mean to NZ.

We also met and oyster farmer who is undertaking a bsiness venture with a new type of capital raising process called 'crowd funding'.  In essence it gets the local community to support the venture in a small way to get it off the ground and add to the social capital of the community.  It was a new concept that could have some merit. We ended the day with a visit to  melon farm near Santa Rosa.  A lovely husband and wife team run the family business which has been in the famliy for over 150 years.

Guanzhou, the real China

Thanks to the difficulties updating my blog I am now faced with a dilema, do I skip the China leg of the trip, run a week late with my entries or blend  current  and drip fed the chinese leg at the same time.  I will try the latter.  We travelled to Guangzhou in Southern China as saw the real China, one whre Westrners are uncommon, let alot e a minivan of them.  We  visited several vegetable farms, fruit markets and got immersed in the culture

 The Chinese have been global traders for Millennia and are very good at it.  Do not be fooled by any preconceptions about China being a third world.  The fact is there are so many of them and they need to interact with people regularly. Commerce is in their blood.

A funny story I must recount relating to the first photograph.  James, my Aussie counterpart from Longreach and I went to buy some bananas from a street vendor.  A young child, possible aged six or so was the salesman and we set about haggling with him for the price of six bananas.  To cut this part of the story short, he took us to the cleaners. As he was filing his six Yuan in his money belt, I caught him grinning ear from ear.  James and I walked ten or so meters before we realised we had been fleeced.  We burst out laughing and were in hysterics when we rejoined the group.  We recounted our trade and our illustrious leader, Jim Gelch sought to teach us youngsters a life lesson in bartering.

Jim went over to the trader, picked up a bunch of six bananas and offered him 5 Yuan, the trade counter offered with six, Jim stuck with five so the boy picked up the bunch and deftly cut off one banana.  This went on for some time till in the end Jim was poised with seven Yuan in one hand and four bananas in the other, with which the boy plucked out the seven Yuan and banked it.  Jim had sucessfully bought four bananas for seven Yuan, nearly twice the cost at which James and I had paid. James and I watched all this in hysterics and congratulated the boys with his brilliant work and photos were taken all round.  The sad part of this story is that the system is that this boy is likely to remain a fruit seller all his life.

 We stumbled accross a street market just behind out hotel and it was like entering a another world.  On side was a busy western shopping precinct and no more than fifty metres away was a market which sold some pretty intersting stuff; live snakes, turtles and toads....for eating.  It struck me here that the western face of China is somewhat like a thin veil.  Most of China is still steeped in tradition but we only see the modern face, which is mostly in pockets, particularly in the smaller centers of only ten million people.

A country of contradictions

As I taxi down the Beijing runway on the way to San Francisco, I have mixed feelings about if I will return to China. I am not sure. I have found China a fascinating place; it is a place of contradictions. I am okay contradictions but in China, the constant contradictions are near exhausting.

Let me explain.

The culture of China is incredible. I have read a little about her history, seen my share of Chinese movies and now have had a good snapshot of the real China. Millennia of cultural development, global trade and innovation has shaped her and the richness of the history is obvious. China is clearly a key figure in the global economy now and will be moreso into the future.

As we traveled through southern,central and northern China, we saw rich bedside poor, communism and capitalism working alongside, beautiful scenery and environmental practices that shocked us, innovative agriculture which make us feel like amateurs and practices which are centuries old, westernism seems to be the measure of success, while one street back off the westernized shopping areas, you enter a Chinese timewarp and have classic street markets selling live snakes, frogs and turtles destined for tonight's dinner.

There are people everywhere and everyone seems anonymous. Perhaps I have over thought this, perhaps i should have just taken it all at face value but the nature of Nuffield is about testing you'r world view with what you see. China is an amazing country, it is a land of opportunity for those

Back from behind the bamboo curtain

I have been cyber-silent for quite some time despite my promises to blog consistently during my travels. Well, its not my doing. I blogged once at the start in China and then it went all wrong. After that blog my internet access gradually got worse and worse. From the start we couldn't access Facebook, Utube or Twitter within China.

 I could access many blog to update it once and then no more. After that went Google Maps and Google Earth followed by Picasa, no remote access to my work computer and finally in the end I couldn't even access my emails.

 This experience was consistent amongst the Nuffield group, a gradual decline of internet access. We discussed this as a group regularly as we thought perhaps there may be some paranoia, but the experience was the same for all.

 I'm sure there is a logical explanation for it........

 Here are a few of the sights we saw along the way.

China - different world...

Rather than do alot of writing, I have added a selection of photos taken today.  Firstly there is the boat trip to Guangzoh, then the vegetable farm we visited and finally dinner where we chose the innocents which we then ate...I also tried a bit of tripe too...

 

 

Did you know that rice grows up to 12ft tall...

Warning the contents below is a little geeky so read with caution if you are not into plant science....but you might learn something!

We visited the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos, Phillippines and got the low-down on rice generally and the work they are doing there.  Rice is not something I knew much about until today.

I learnt a couple of useful facts that are well worth dropping into the odd conversation.  Such as at IRRI there are over 110,000 strains of rice in the seed bank

; there are two other seed banks globally which store 500 grams of seed in each; there is aerobic and anaerobic grown rice; a new strain of rice has been developed which contains vitamin A, the second largest mineral deficiency amongst children in the developing world, the greatest mineral deficiency is iron for which they are currently working on a strain of rice which supplies that

; they have long running trials (50 years continious cropping) which show a surprisingly little yield drop with no fertiliser application - yield approx 60% of fertilised plots

; some strains of rice can grow up to 12ft tall which are then harvested by boat.

We visited the Genebank, the Genetic Transformation laboratory and the Molecular Marker Applications Laboratory, the Rice Museum and the C4 rice plant growth facilties.

A couple of things struck me as really significant in the area of the rice plant breeding progamme, the development of flood tolerant rice, iron rich rice and on the horizon is the development of a C4 strain of rice (rice is currently C3).  I am not going to give  plant science lecture on the difference between C4 and C3 plants other than to say as a C4 rice plant it will be hugely more productive; photosynthesis will increase by 100%, it will be 1.5 - 3 x more water efficient, nitrogen use efficiency will increase by 260% and yield will increase by 50%.  It will be nothing short of transformational so if you want to unserstand C3/C4 stuff better do a Google search on it and stun your friends at dinner parties.