Growing wisdom cultivation

China's experiences can foster deepened global collaboration on agricultural heritage systems

Escalating climate chaos and the erosion of intergenerational farming wisdom create near-identical hardships for smallholder farmers across the globe: persistently low crop yields, limited access to overseas markets and stagnant household incomes. These struggles affect most of the 104 Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems recognized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, spreading across 29 countries.

Among the varied reasons for this, one stands out: Fragmented, country-siloed management prevents agricultural heritage from delivering its full ecological, cultural and economic value to humanity. Without unified, long-term international collaboration, it is not easy for a single nation to turn scattered agricultural heritage resources into actionable solutions for climate resilience, rural poverty and cultural erosion.

In this regard, China's GIAHS governance and cross-border cooperation experience may offer useful lessons for building a functional global collaborative system that unlocks shared benefits for all nations and their small-scale agricultural producers.

China hosts 25 GIAHS sites, the world's largest portfolio, covering drylands, terraces, rice-fish symbiosis and fruit agroforestry. Institutionally, China rolled out one of the world's first dedicated national governance frameworks for agricultural heritage in 2015. This system forms a complete chain covering certification, local stewardship, community participation and industrial revitalization.

The country also maintains long-standing institutional ties with the FAO. The two sides jointly run global training networks and cross-continental field exchange programs, with proven experience in organizing transnational workshops and cultural initiatives.

Drawing on these assets, China has built four interlinked, results-driven cooperation models that could help solve the global fragmentation and deliver tangible gains for overseas smallholders.

The FAO-backed multilateral capacity-building program serves as an important platform for international cooperation. Launched in Sanya, Hainan province, in March, the joint $3 million GIAHS Phase II program operates a Hainan-based global capacity platform that hosts annual training sessions for 1,000 heritage managers and agricultural technicians worldwide. Its flagship achievement is the rice-fish symbiosis technology transfer under the FAO-China South-South Cooperation Programme. Chinese specialists have introduced the model to Nigeria and Sierra Leone, nearly doubling local rice and tilapia harvests and strengthening food security and household revenue. The system has since been extended to Mali, Uganda and Kenya.

Complementing this multilateral effort, formal bilateral heritage pairings create equal, lasting two-way exchange channels. The Fuzhou Jasmine and Tea Culture System and France's Burgundy wine authorities have enabled reciprocal field visits and joint cultural exhibitions since they launched their GIAHS partnership in 2014. Similarly, Xinghua Duotian Agrosystem in Jiangsu province has forged ties with Mexico's Chinampa floating farmlands, a designated GIAHS site, to exchange wetland conservation expertise and co-release multilingual promotional materials for global audiences.

Chinese institutions also regularly run joint workshops with designers, heritage artisans and villagers from France, Laos and Mongolia. Participants capture compelling images from daily farm life and produce short videos for social media that share intimate stories and engage overseas audiences.

In addition, cross-border industrial linkages help bridge the gap between heritage production and global sales. Partnered GIAHS sites codevelop unified visual brand identities and share cross-border e-commerce infrastructure.

China's cooperation framework tackles the core weaknesses of agricultural heritage management by transferring low-cost ecological farming techniques via training and demonstration farms, and jointly developing unified branding — logos, packaging and promotional imagery — that makes heritage products more recognizable and marketable abroad. To reach different audiences, professional forums were initiated for policymakers, short videos for the general public, and hands-on training for local farmers.

These efforts are already yielding measurable results.

In Qingtian county in Zhejiang province, the rice-fish symbiosis system helped farmers earn an average of 15,000 yuan ($2,215) more per hectare. In Inner Mongolia autonomous region's Aohan Banner, a dryland farming system has built a millet brand, with organic varieties fetching 2.5 times the price of conventional millet. In Xinghua, Jiangsu province, the Duotian Agrosystem attracted 7.65 million tourists in 2024. In Fuzhou, Fujian province, the jasmine and tea culture system has grown into an industry that supports 26,000 flower-growing households with an average annual income increase of 12,000 yuan per household.

In these heritage sites, integrated branding and agrotourism development have drawn significant numbers of young people back to rural areas.

While challenges remain, China's experience encourages the global community to address the problems that agricultural heritage faces together.

First, countries should work together to establish global design standards for GIAHS branding. This includes unified visual identity guidelines and standardized procedures for developing creative products, which will reduce transaction costs for cross-border co-branding. In addition, they should explore long-standing transnational cooperation mechanisms, such as annual joint field surveys, regular online exhibitions with global participation and multinational designer workshops.

Second, inclusive and equitable resource-sharing mechanisms can be expanded. Ecological farming outreach should scale up via overseas demonstration bases across Asia, Africa and Latin America to boost regional grain yields and smallholder revenue. Governments, industry associations, commercial enterprises and local villagers should build a four-party transnational operation system that streamlines cross-border supply and sales chains and narrows resource gaps between wealthy and disadvantaged heritage sites.

More collaboration can also address production scale by helping smallholders aggregate output for export and expand market access by building shared distribution networks, especially for those products that share similar features or use similar farming technologies, with full respect to indigenous conditions.

Third, countries can engage in joint research on climate adaptation, shared digital platforms for heritage tourism and youth exchange programs to pass on traditional skills to the next generation.

A growth in production and global outreach helps increase youth attraction. Heritage sites that offer stable incomes and modern career pathways, as seen in Qingtian, where integrated farming and branded products have drawn younger participants back to rural areas, are far more likely to sustain their traditions into the next generation.

Deepened global GIAHS collaboration delivers universal, multilayered benefits that isolated national efforts cannot match.

Economically, shared low-cost traditional farming technologies raise crop yields and diversify household income. Joint creative products and shared e-commerce channels unlock wider global market access. Ecologically, coordinated promotion of climate-resilient ancient farming models equips more regions with nature-positive tools to counter extreme weather, land degradation and food shortages. Culturally, multinational cocreating safeguards diverse agrarian civilizations and fosters balanced two-way dialogue rather than one-sided cultural exports. Institutionally, unified global standards and long-term frameworks ensure that all heritage sites gain fair access to technical, branding and market resources.

Agricultural heritage belongs to all humanity. All nations should advance multilateral and bilateral GIAHS partnerships to collectively protect the world's diverse living farming civilizations. Equal, respectful cross-border collaboration will steadily lift the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of smallholders and inject enduring momentum into global sustainable rural development.

Han Yueyue is a researcher at the China Agricultural Museum. Zhou Min is a senior engineer at the Center of International Cooperation Service under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China.

The authors contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.