Is Africa Becoming China’s Bread Basket? It Looks Like It

June 11, 2009

Martin McCauley writes: China has traditionally been a hungry country. Floods and famine were scourges which haunted the Middle Kingdom’s rulers for centuries. Social unrest flared when there was not enough to eat. One of the achievements of the People’s Republic has been to solve the age old problem of producing enough food to feed the growing population. The one child policy, adopted in 1979, was used to prevent population increase. Beijing claims that it has prevented the birth of almost 300 million children since then. Now only about 20 million are added to the total every year.The one child policy has its downside. One is that families prefer male children. They are pampered (and called ‘little emperors’) and can behave irresponsibly. One family I know has been devastated by their only son. The parents have even moved out of the family flat in order to live a more peaceful life. Another downside is that there is a severe shortage of girls building up. Tales of the kidnapping of girls -some as young as two years old – are now common. So lucrative is the business that girls in Myanmar are being seized and brought to China.

The new Chinese middle class can get round the one child family policy by simply bribing officials. Children born years apart are registered as twins, for instance. Sooner or later this policy will have to go.

Whatever one thinks of the one child policy it has allowed China to feed itself. However the new middle class is acquiring the eating habits of the developed world: more meat, milk products, coffee, chocolate and so on. The average Chinese consumed 25kg of meat in 1985 but it is now 55kg and is expected to rise to 70kg in 2020. The problem is that the arable land on which to grow crops is decreasing. This is partly due to industrial development, the building of a transport network and housing. China lost 8.9 million hectares of arable land between 1995 and 2007. The northern and western parts of the country are becoming drier. Wind erosion is carrying away soil. Dust storms over Beijing and further afield – such as Seoul – now occur every year.

This leaves only two options: buy more and more food on the international market or produce it oneself in foreign countries. As the world’s population increases so does the demand for food. Rice is a case in point. Last year some rice producing countries banned the export of this staple.

China’s foreign trade surplus permits it to buy worldwide. Beijing will buy all the soya bean produced by Brazil. It is even willing to purchase all the milk and lamb produced by New Zealand. Milk from Uruguay finds its way on to Chinese tables.

The other option is to produce the food abroad. In the 1990s Beijing began to encourage Chinese companies to produce food abroad. Initially this mainly concerned Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. However local resistance led to China turning its attention to Africa. Most Chinese investment is concentrated in southern Africa: Mozambique, Tanzania, Malawi and, increasingly, Angola. The first investment was in Zambia in 1995. By 2007 China had 63 agricultural investment projects in southern Africa. Some of these are huge cattle raising undertakings. China now encourages African states to put agricultural development at the top of their agenda.

China has pledged $800 million to modernise Mozambique’s agriculture. Rice production is to rise from 100,000 tonnes to 500,000 tonnes. Over a hundred Chinese specialists are stationed there to train locals and develop more hybrid strains. Irrigation and canal building are important. One project is to link land locked Malawi via Lake Malawi to rivers and dams in Mozambique.

The Zambezi valley is major area of development. In 2006 Beijing granted Mozambique a $2.3 billion soft loan to build a huge dam. In return the Chinese want to lease huge farms, many of them for raising cattle. Over 3,000 Chinese are to move to the country to run these farms.

Angola is China’s main trading partner in Africa and supplies 15 per cent of the country’s oil imports. The vastness of the country – 1.2 million square kilometres – and modest population – 16 million – offer Beijing enormous opportunities to expand agricultural production. Cattle raising is an obvious choice but Angola can also produce spices, coffee, tropical fruit, sugar and cotton.

Tanzania and Senegal are keen to acquire more Chinese agricultural expertise. China sees a mutually beneficial partnership developing: Africa desperately needs to upgrade its agriculture and China needs food from Africa.

Perhaps the long hoped green revolution in Africa will have Chinese characteristics. Let’s hope so.

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Tags: Africa, China, foodstuffs