Rethinking Chinese engagement in Africa

Source: Rethinking Chinese engagement in Africa | zimbabweland August 1, 2016

One of the projects I have been running over the last few years has focused on how China and Brazil have engaged in African agriculture. It involved research in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, as well as China and Brazil.

The results have been published in a special issue of World Development, available free to download. As I reflected in a recent blog on The Conversation site, Chinese engagements are often not what they seem, and run counter to many of the standard media narratives. A SciDev article recently featured the project too, summarising key findings.

In a recent ChinaFile podcast, I explained some of the results to Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden. Here’s what’s on the ChinaFile site, and the podcast is below:

“The Western and African media have long fuelled the myth that Chinese investors are buying up vast tracts of land across Africa as part of a neo-colonial plan to export food back to China. Sure, on one level, the theory appears plausible: China has around 20 percent of the world’s population with less than seven percent of the planet’s arable land, so it seems obvious that Beijing might look abroad in search of farmland to feed its people. There’s only one small problem. That premise, no matter how convincing it may sound, is just flat-out wrong.

Johns Hopkins University professor Deborah Brautigam detailed all of the reasons why this myth remains so durable in her 2015 book Will Africa Feed China? A lot of it, according to Brautigam, has to do with a mix of bad journalism, Western narratives of African victimization, and the Chinese themselves who oversell their ambitions in Africans.

Now, though, there’s a twist to the story. Not only are the Chinese not on a land-buying spree in Africa, it appears they are actually doing more to support African agricultural development than any other country in the world.

Professor Ian Scoones from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex recently completed a four-country research project on Chinese agricultural engagement in Africa and discovered that the combination of Chinese immigrant farmers in Africa along with the deployment of Chinese agricultural technology and People’s Republic of China government training programs that have brought some 10,000 African officials to China have all had a remarkably positive impact on Africa’s struggling agricultural sector.

Professor Scoones joins Eric and Cobus to discuss why Chinese engagement in African agriculture is not what it seems.”

This post was written by Ian Scoones and appeared on Zimbabweland