4 - Agriculture

Summary

China has a long history of evolving engagements in Africa’s agricultural sector, from establishment of large-scale state farms to technical cooperation and commercial investments. Since 2006, more than twenty agricultural technology demonstration centers have been built in various African countries, aiming to ameliorate knowledge transfer and skill training through sustainable business practices. Although Chinese have constantly modified the operational manners to address problems encountered in the practice, most of the agricultural projects still fail to achieve their expected results. As subsistence farming dominates Africa’s rural area, multiple factors, including immature market mechanism, low productivity, outdated farming behaviors, and politicization of land-related issues, influence each other in an intertwined fashion and hamper effective modernization of the sector. Scattered foreign aid projects and investments can hardly generate substantial and sustainable impacts. The rumors of land grabs proved to be ungrounded and ignorant of the reality. Pilot Chinese enterprises focuses on connecting agricultural production with the development of an industrial value chain in Africa rather than acquiring large pieces of land.