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

Abstract

The widespread phenomenon of unsafe food on the Chinese market has been argued to be both symptomatic of moral disregard for the well-being of strangers and productive of social distrust. Organic farming has grown in recent years in response to this situation, and this article discusses the ethical work of farmers based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at one such farm in northern China. While the Community Supported Agriculture model of the farm is shown to hinge upon establishing personal trust with member households, turning strangers into associates, the entire project of organic farming is shown to be undergirded by strong expressions of solidarity with conventional farmers framed in the language of moral economy. Engaging with theories of relational morality, the article proposes instead an extended concept of moral economies that allows us to capture the coexistence of differential care alongside horizontal solidarities within the moral landscape of contemporary China.