Chinese food self‑provisioning: key sustainability policy lessons hidden in plain sight

Jehlička, P., Ma, H., Kostelecký, T., Smith, J., 2023. Chinese food self‑provisioning: key sustainability policy lessons hidden in plain sight. Agriculture and Human Values, online first, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10506-7.

Drawing on Petr Jehlička and his colleagues’ research on urban food self-provisioning (FSP) in Eastern Europe, this article takes this work to China and argues that progress in sustainability scholarship can be accelerated by embracing a greater diversity of framings of sustainability. It brings four important empirical findings concerning (i) the prevalence of Chinese urban FSP, (ii) the social diversity of its practitioners, (iii) their primarily non-economic motivations, (iv) and production methods meeting the criteria for organic food that are deployed by more than a third of urban food growers. Although the results from the survey which was an empirical basis of this research cannot be considered representative of the general Chinese population and can provide only a rough estimate of the overall prevalence of FSP in China, it is evident that FSP is widespread and is practised by a significant share of the Chinese urban population (68 per cent of the respondents to the survey grew food in their gardens). On this basis, the article highlights the importance of greater attention to identifying and valuing ‘already existing sustainability’ in non-Western contexts, rather than privileging Western conceptualizations of sustainability that promise sustainability innovation in the future.