User:Joshsminer/sandbox

Poverty in China
There is a section in this article dedicated to Urban poverty in China and I feel like it is important to cover the rural poverty as well.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.502.7224&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Sustainable Agriculture:
Add to Barriers on geographic barriers.

Add section of solutions to geographic barriers. i.e. Greenhouses.

Rural Poverty
Section on geographic barriers.

???, many organizations are building greenhouses with the notion that it will help end poverty. Where can I put this information? Is it in hte Greenhouse section creating section. "Use in Poverty alleviation" or in a rural poverty section with "solutions to geographic barriers"?

Edit the geographic barriers and talk about the problems that arise from the geographic barrier of harsh mountainous regions. Talk about the potential solution of greenhouses.

Rural Poverty in China
Over the past few decades China has become an economic giant and the rapidly growing economy has led to millions of people coming out of poverty in China. This poverty reduction is not even across demographics as rural China still lags behind and is now comparatively worse off than before.

Decision
I am going to edit the article "Poverty in China" for my area. In this article I will add the section rural poverty, and explain what issues the people in rural China are facing. I will include information on their educational opportunities, their food needs, and the laws restricting migration from rural China.

I am going to edit the article "Sustainable Agriculture" for my sector. In this article I will adjust the section "Barriers" and split it into subsections "Socio-political Barriers" and "Geographic Barriers" I will add information about the geographic barriers to sustainable agriculture, namely altitude and other harsh climates. Within the "Geographic Barriers" I will add a subsection called "Solutions to Geographic Barriers" in which I will address the use of greenhouses to mitigate the problems of sustainable agriculture in those regions.

Scholarly Sources
Sector

1.      Design and Modeling of a Greenhouse for a Remote Region in Nepal

"Design and Modeling of a Greenhouse for a Remote Region in Nepal"doi10.1016/j.proeng.2012.10.123ISSN1877-7058

This article focuses on the research approach on how to best overcome the mountainous region of Nepal. In the article, the authors lay out a specific greenhouse design to best to best satisfy the local needs and at the lowest cost. While this paper is technical in some places and hard to use for Wikipedia, it also clearly lays out the issues faced by the people of Humla, Nepal in regards to geographic barriers such as high altitude and harsh climate. This article is a great example on how the geographic barriers can be taken down through the implementation of good greenhouses. This will be useful for my PE because I will need to understand what problems the people in Xining are having in order to best know how a greenhouse could help them in their capacity.

2.      Solar desalination

Chaibi, M. T. "An overview of solar desalination for domestic and agriculture water needs in remote arid areas." Desalination 127.2 (2000): 119-133.

This paper examines the possibility of implementing a greenhouse with a built-in desalination mechanism to allow for the greenhouse to produce extra water that could be used to irrigate crops. Through a system of light transmission, evaporation, and syphoning off water, the greenhouses can not only grow the crops needed, but also desalinate water that can be further used to irrigate the crops. This could be extremely helpful during my practice experience because I know that water scarcity is a large reason for the implementation of greenhouses where I am going. I am unsure how accessible salt water is, but if it is easily accessible, the process of solar desalination through greenhouses would potentially benefit the local people even more.

Strategies for the Sustainable Development of Mountain Agriculture: An Overview.

Jodha, N.S. (1993). Strategies for the Sustainable Development of Mountain Agriculture: An Overview. http://ceedasia.org/Publications/strategies%20for%20the%20sustainable%20development%20of%20mountain%20agriculture%20in%20sustainable%20mountain%20agriculture.pdf : Oxford.

This article frames the issues surrounding the issue of global climate change. The authors take a business approach when addressing the use of sustainable development in producing all of the goods we need. The article gives supporting evidence on how issues surrounding mountain agriculture and sustainable development have come together. My PE will be a conjunction of these two spaces as a try to both provide the people greater access to healthier food and more of it, while also spending less resources. My PE org's focus is to bring sustainable agriculture to the people of Xining which is similar to the discourse taken in this book on how to best provide more, healthier food, while at the same time using less water for tea and coffee.

3.      Building food security in the Canadian Arctic

"Building food security in the Canadian Arctic through the development of sustainable community greenhouses and gardening"doi10.1080/11956860.2018.1493260ISSN1195-6860

This article analyzes how the creation and use of different agricultural projects could help the native people of Nunavik in northern Canada. The study conducted finds that these programs will help with food production and nutritional intake in this region; however, the geographic location poses a problem. The area's isolation and arctic climate make the sustainable agriculture problem difficult to achieve. This article will be useful for my "Geographic Barriers" section because it provides insight on how these beneficial programs are unable to be implemented because of geographic barriers. This will also be useful to understand for my PE because I will be building these greenhouses in hard to access locations, and some locations will not be able to receive a greenhouse because of how difficult it will be to build it.

4.      Seawater desalination

Shaffer, Devin; Yip, Ngai (2012-10-01). "Seawater desalination for agriculture by integrated forward and reverse osmosis: Improved product water quality for potentially less energy". Journal of Membrane Science. 415-416: 1–8. doi:10.1016/j.memsci.2012.05.016. ISSN 0376-7388.

This scientific article goes into the process of desalinating seawater for the purposes of irrigating crops. It argues that seawater desalination is a viable process for increasing the water supply available for agricultural purposes. In Qinghai, where my PE is located, there is the largest lake in China; however, it is a salt water lake and its water cannot currently be used for agricultural production. With the desalination process of seawater, the water from Qinghai lake could be used to help with crop irrigation.

5.       Reduction in greenhouse water usage

Stacey, N., Fox, J., & Hildebrandt, D. (2018). Reduction in greenhouse water usage through inlet CO2 enrichment. AIChE Journal, 64(7), 2324-2328.

This article focuses on how greenhouses reduce the consumption of water for agricultural production and offers ways as to reduce water usage even further. It suggests strategies to increase CO2­ enrichment of the soil so that less airflow is needed within the greenhouse which allows it to keep the water inside. If I could implement some of the strategies from this paper such as using silica membrane, I could help my PE org construct greenhouses that use even less water. Since water is a limited resource in the Tibetan plateau, the water saved could help the local people immensely.

6.      Implications of desalination for water resources in China

Zhou, Y., & Tol, R. S. (2004). Implications of desalination for water resources in China—an economic perspective. Desalination, 164(3), 225-240.

This economic paper studies the process of desalination in China in order to deal with the impending water shortage crisis. It argues that the cost of desalination must decrease for it to be a viable solution for China to implement. While my practice experience is not explicitly dealing with water desalination, it is geared to using less water for agriculture. I think that this paper is useful to understanding whether desalination will be feasible as a future way to help out the local people.

Area

1.       The impact of China's hukou system

Afridi, Farzana, Sherry Xin Li, and Yufei Ren. "Social identity and inequality: The impact of China's hukou system." Journal of Public Economics 123 (2015): 17-29.

2.       Poverty, food insecurity and nutritional deprivation in rural China

"Poverty, food insecurity and nutritional deprivation in rural China: Implications for children's literacy achievement"doi10.1016/j.ijedudev.2012.07.003ISSN0738-0593

This source looks at the correlation between poverty and schooling. It argues that food-insecure children are less likely to be able to read than a food-secure child given the same circumstances. Other factors such as undernourishment are studied and also found to have a correlation with low literacy level. This article is incredible informative on what some “side effects” of poverty may be. It will be useful to know about these on my PE so as to know what the people may be going through besides the lack of money. It strikes me that poverty is such a determining factor in children’s’ ability to succeed in school and be able to read. I am curious to discover the general literacy level of the Qinghai people during my time there.

3.      Spatio-temporal patterns of rural poverty in China

Liu, Y., Liu, J., & Zhou, Y. (2017). Spatio-temporal patterns of rural poverty in China and targeted poverty alleviation strategies. Journal of Rural Studies, 52, 66-75.

This study examines the change in rural poverty in China over 1978, 2006, 2012, and 2014 in order to see how it has changed over the past 50 years and past 10 years. This study puts forward that poverty has been reducing in rural China since the area that have traditionally been impoverished have gradually improved. The article hypothesizes that it is mainly geographic barriers that are creating this systemic poverty due to high education costs, low access to water, and difficult accessibility. This article was particularly striking in regards to my PE because it uses the province I am going to and the people I will be working with as an exception to gradual poverty alleviation over the past 50 years, “The incidences of poverty in the Tibetan ethnic areas in… Qinghai province, the Wumeng Mountain area and Tibet area, however, were still relatively high.” I will be volunteering in Qinghai to help the Tibetan ethnic group there overcome geographic barriers.

4.       Selective policy implementation in rural China

O'Brien, Kevin J.; Li, Lianjiang (1999-01). "Selective Policy Implementation in Rural China". Comparative Politics. 31 (2): 167. doi:10.2307/422143. ISSN 0010-4159

This article looks at how the structure of the Chinese political system affects rural China especially in regards to the local cadre. The article establishes that the cadre plays a large role in determining what government policy is enforced, and how it is enforced. I found this article incredibly informative for my own PE because while I was skyping one of my organization's employees, I was warned that I would likely be stopped by what they called police, but which I now know means cadre. The cadre system theoretically rewards the hardest people in the village by elevating them to a higher position and allowing them to make decisions. I will want to establish some idea about the cadre in the area I will be living in order to ensure that I will not have many problems while I am here.

5.       Transformation of Rural China

Unger, Jonathan (2016-09-16). "The Transformation of Rural China". Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315292052.

This extensive book on rural China goes through the Mao era and to 2016 looking at how rural China has changed. It puts forward that China as a whole has greatly reduced its poverty level, but that there are still tens of millions of rural farmers living in poverty. The book touches on the increasing divide between the rural and urban sectors of China. Because the rural areas are not industrialized the way big cities are, I will likely run into many people who still remember Mao Zedong and his reign over China. I look forward to seeing how things they perceive things to have changed since then. I am also interested in the dichotomy between urban and rural sectors because I will be spending four months in urban Beijing before going off to my rural PE.

6.      Transient poverty, poverty dynamics, and vulnerability to poverty

Ward, Patrick S. (2016-02-01). "Transient poverty, poverty dynamics, and vulnerability to poverty: An empirical analysis using a balanced panel from rural China". World development. 78: 541–553. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.10.022. ISSN 0305-750X. PMC 4740920. PMID 26855470.

7.      Dispersing, regulating and upgrading

Wong, C., Qiao, M., & Zheng, W. (2018). ‘Dispersing, regulating and upgrading’ urban villages in suburban Beijing. Town Planning Review, 89(6), 597-621.

This article examines the effects of both the emergence of urban villages in large cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, and the response to these illegal buildings and migrants by the Chinese government. This article illustrates the government using the hukou system in order to expel rural migrants from large cities. The importance from this article for my PE is that the people I will be working with do not have the option to move to a larger city to accomplish career goals. They are restricted by the government from moving to the cities and may be evicted and sent back home if they try.

On This page I want to flush out the Barriers section and put in geography as a barrier to sustainable agriculture. (Canada Paper)
add geographic barriers

I want to start a section under barriers called "Solution To Barriers" In this section I will talk about how Greenhouses can be used to get around barriers such as altitude, etc.

Discovered a site called "International Centre for Integrated mountain Development" (ICIMOD) which focuses on sustainable agriculture in the mountains.

Poverty In China
I want to add the Section "Rural Poverty"

Contributions
Legend: Underlined - Text found already on wikipedia page. Strikethrough : text removed from original wikipedia page.

Epistemic Barriers
Since World War II, dominant models of agriculture in the United States and the entire national food system have been characterized by a focus on monetary profitability at the expense of social and environmental integrity.

In sustainable agriculture, changes in lower rates of soil and nutrient loss, improved soil structure, and higher levels of beneficial microorganisms are not quick. The changes are not immediately evident to the operate when using sustainable agriculture. In conventional agriculture the benefits are easily visible with no weeds, pests, etc. and the "process of externalization" hides the costs to soil and ecosystems around it. A major barrier to sustainable agriculture is the lack of knowledge of its benefits. Many benefits are not visible, so they are often unknown.

Geographic Barriers
Not all geographic regions lend themselves easily to sustainable agriculture. While all parts of the world with human population need food to survive, many of these places are located in climates that make food production difficult. In Nunavik, which is located in northern Canada, it was discovered that the sustainable agricultural development needed to provide its native population with better nutrition would be difficult to adopt due to the regions isolation and arctic climate. Sustainable agriculture in regions where resources are scarce can be difficult due to the restrictions on the productive abilities of the area. Certain areas lack fertile soil to grow crops, others lack the technology to produce models for sustainability, and some do not have enough water for agricultural upkeep.

Solutions to Geographic Barriers
The technological advancement of the past few decades have allowed access to these areas and the means to develop sustainable agriculture in some of these previously obstructed regions. The implementation of greenhouses has been an effective method in overcoming the geographic barriers in certain parts of the world. For example, Nepal has implemented greenhouses to deal with its high altitude and mountainous regions. Greenhouses have also been used to provide sustainable agriculture to arid climates in places such as Africa and Mexico. Greenhouses allow for greater crop production because of increased humidity and also use less water since it is a closed system.

Desalination techniques have been developed to allow greater access to fresh water in areas that have historically had limited access. The desalination process turns salt water into fresh water and will allow the irrigation of crops to continue without making a harmful impact on the water supply. While desalination can prove to be an effective tool to provide fresh water to areas that need it to sustain agriculture, it requires money and resources. regions of China have been considering large scale desalination in order to increase access to water, but the current cost of the desalination process makes it impractical.

Rural Poverty
While poverty has been reduced immensely in China over the past decade, it still remains a large problem in rural China. Rural China has historically been disproportionately taxed and also have received fewer benefits from the recent economic development and success of China. Agriculture has been the main occupation for the inhabitants of rural China, and in villages the produce generated is used to feed the village and not for selling on the market. Even in the heartlands of China where agriculture is used for commercial purposes, the economic boom of China has actually led to a decrease in the price of produce which has resulted in a loss of income for these producers.

Children growing up in poverty are more likely to be undernourished, have less educational opportunity, and have lower literacy levels. The disproportionate amount of inequality in China's rural sector along with correlation between poverty and education shows that children born in rural China are much more likely to score lower on literacy tests and not have the opportunity to pursue higher education.

The implementation of Chinese policy has exacerbated the issue of rural poverty en lieu of increased urban poverty. Typically the urbanization of a country leads to mass migration from the rural areas to the urban. However, the Chinese government implemented policy that restricts the migration of people born in rural China from coming to urban China. This restriction is based on the citizen's registration under the hukou system which states if the individual was born in an agricultural (rural) or non-agricultural (urban) area. Additionally, Chinese officials have been cracking down on Chinese migrants from rural communities that have moved to Beijing. In 2017, thousands of migrant workers living in Beijing were evicted because they did not possess an urban hukou. This process of removing migrants from rural to urban China, relocates them back to rural China where they no longer have a job or source of income. This is a relocation of poverty from the urban sector to the rural sector.

The political response of China's government to the issue of rural poverty has been both lauded and criticized. China has been criticized for its high rate of rural poverty and the policies that the government has put in place to ameliorate the poverty. In Transformation of Rural China, Jonathan Unger points out that the lack of taxation at the village level restricts the villages from dealing with the problems they face. This means problems such as food instability and lack of education are not able to be addressed by local officials. Supporters of government policy point out that over the time period of 1978 to 2014, China has reduced rural poverty from 250 million people to just over 70 million people. China's Rural Poverty Alleviation and Development Outline from 2001 to 2010 led to certain government policy directly dealing with the issue of poverty with the removal of agriculture tax in 2006 and a program which the government paid rural families to plant trees on degraded land.

Article Evaluation

 * Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
 * Everything in the article is related to the topic of Poverty in China. I imagine that as this article is more flushed out it will be broken into multiple different articles because there is so much to cover.
 * Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
 * Most information looks up to date and relevant. There is a lot of talk about how poor China was back in the 1970s but no clear examples besides some statistics. There is also a point where the article mentions that there aren't really any "slums" in China. I would like to see hutongs at least mentioned here since those have historically been the slums of Urban China.
 * Also there is no mention of the air quality in China which is notoriously bad. This is very relevant to poverty in China since there is such poor air quality that it causes health problems for much of the population.
 * What else could be improved?
 * The article talks about how today most of the poverty in China is rural poverty, yet does not address the problems of rural poverty in the article. it focuses mainly on urban poverty and the inequality between urban and rural sectors.


 * Is the article neutral? Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
 * The article seems relatively neutral and I realize I am looking at it with my own bias. I think that some of the sources it uses are biased since they are newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and China Daily. Also it seems to give a lot of credence to World Bank statistics without addressing the problems they have had.
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
 * I feel that the article says rural poverty is more abundant than urban poverty, but then does not proceed to talk about rural poverty very much and instead focuses on urban poverty.


 * Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
 * Yes, the links do work and the sources support the claims made.
 * Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
 * Some of the sources are newspapers that represent a bias. while each fact is referenced, the bias that the sources may have, are not noted. I think that a lot of the statistics from the World Bank and the Millennial Development Goals are favored to show progress towards poverty alleviation.


 * What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
 * There really is not much going on behind the scenes especially recently. very few changes have been made in the last six months and the talk page seems quite outdated.
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
 * This article is rated c-class, mid-importance and is part of the China WikiProject and Socialism WikiProject.
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?
 * This article really puts forward that progress is being made slowly but surely. It also presents this idea that urban poverty was fixed and now rural poverty will follow. It does not link that the Hukou which limits free mobility is partially why urban poverty is not as bad as rural poverty. The problem is just kept out of sight from the masses.