Prof. Dr. Xiaoping Sun (Rachel Carson Center, München/ Saint Mary’s University, Canada)

What are China's strategies to feed the world's largest population in the face of competing priorities: meeting people's increasing demand for healthy food, mitigating environmental degradation, and defending national interests in the global food market dominated by western agribusiness giants? How and why are those strategies devised and adopted? This talk analyzes current agricultural policies and the practices of state-owned agrifood enterprises to showcase China's moves toward sustainable food security.

Dr. Xiaoping Sun, Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU, and Assistant Professor of History at Saint Mary's University, Canada. Her current research project, “Feeding the Nation from the Wilderness: Food, Migration, and Environment on China’s Northeastern Borderland,” examines the historic transformation of Beidahuang (北大荒, the Great Northern Wilderness) from China’s largest concentration of freshwater wetlands in the late 1940s to its largest agribusiness that can feed 10% of the Chinese population in the 2000s.This research will reveal the mutual transformation between the state, humans, and nature resulted from the state mobilized migration to the frontier region in China’s pursuit of national food security and agricultural modernity.