Moralizing markets for farmland protection: urban-rural solidarity through responsible consumption in Guangdong, China

Abstract

How are moralized markets made, and by whom? Research on ethical consumption and alternative food networks generally locates the moral qualities of markets in grassroots activism, social movements, or producer–consumer cooperation, while public authorities appear as regulators or certifiers. Much less is known about settings in which public governance objectives are deliberately translated into moralized exchange through intermediaries. This article examines Guangdong Province's “adoption and protection” scheme, a provincial pilot in which urban consumers, enterprises, and institutions pay fees linked to certified farmland plots and receive agricultural products, access to traceability information, and adoption certificates in return. Drawing on policy and technical documents, platform materials, and 21 semi-structured interviews conducted between October 2023 and June 2025, and combining process tracing with discourse-device analysis, we develop the concept of the moralized market device to show how moral claims about food security and farmland protection are rendered payable, calculable, and third-party verifiable. The scheme operates through moralization, device formation, and spatial reorganization, and generates distinct distributional effects. Crucially, it is not a fiscal rebate program administered by government departments: it is a government-guided and supervised, association-led and platform-mediated market arrangement financed mainly by socially raised adoption-and-protection fees, in which a quasi-public industry association and digital platforms perform institutional brokerage between public objectives, market transactions and social participation. The urban-rural solidarity so produced is mediated and conditional: participation is structured by ability to pay, certification thresholds, and platform compatibility, favoring state farms and capitalized producers. We therefore read the scheme as a fragile, supplementary mechanism rather than a substitute for public investment, and as a pilot whose lessons are analytical rather than directly generalizable.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Rural Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗