'Shrooms take Southwest China! This semester's first Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture examines the booming matsutake mushroom trade in this talk titled, Transforming More-than-human Economies in Southwest China: The role of the Matsutake Mushroom. Michael Hathaway of Simon Frasier University, British Columbia is our guest speaker. 

Abstract: Since the 1980s, the trade in one of the world’s most valuable wild fungi, the matsutake mushroom, has fostered tremendous social change for people in Southwest China. This region has become the world’s main center for a global trade, worth over a billion dollars a year. The matsutake economy is shaping ethnic minority communities, including Yi and Tibetan peoples, some of whom have gotten rid of their grazing animals such as goats and yaks to commit themselves to the mushroom trade. At the same time, Beijing has initiated environmental transformation of these uplands in the Tibetan Plateau, valuing these places more in terms of watershed protection than agricultural production. After a major flood in 1998, affecting more than 300 million lowland residents, the government instituted a logging ban over a vast area, a policy that inadvertently pushed more people away from pastoralism and towards matsutake.

The East Asia Program would like to thank our co-sponsors for their generous support: The Polson Institute for Global Development, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Developmental Sociology.