TITLE:
Intensified Smallholder Pig Farming in Rural Yunnan: Implications for Livelihood, Culture, Gender, Health and Environment
AUTHORS:
Jing Fang
KEYWORDS:
Intensified Pig Farming, Smallholders, Livelihood, Culture and Gender, Health Implications, Environment Implications
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.10 No.8,
July
29,
2022
ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to draw the attention of policy makers and research
communities to the critical but often ignored relationships between intensified smallholder
pig farming, livelihood, poverty alleviation, culture, gender, health and
environment in mountainous areas of Yunnan Province, China. It documents
changes in how pigs are farmed in one
county of Yunnan over the
last four decades and analyzes the impact of pig rearing on local livelihood, culture
and gender as well as its implications for health and environment. It concludes
that modern pig rearing techniques that are intended to be used in large-scale industry pig farming operations
have been partially adopted by poor
farmers in smallholder pig farming settings, and this has generated a wide
spectrum of different pig production systems and also changed disease risks
associated with pig farming. It is hard to predict and manage the risks given
the rapid, diverse, complex and dynamic changes in the intensified smallholder
pig farming systems. The environmental pollution associated with these pig
production systems is also different to that caused by major pig production companies,
and also calls for new management approaches.