On March 15, 2008, The Economist released a magazine titled “The New Colonialists.” Across the iconic front cover, eight travelers sit atop camels trudging through the Sahara; the leader of them firmly holds in his right hand the flag of China.
It caused a stir, especially in the United States. It depicted a Chinese conquest of Africa, one that reminded the West eerily of its own scramble for Africa in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But even more frightening to the West: It seemed believable. China harbors only eight percent of the world’s arable land but contains twenty percent of the human population. This disparity places a strain on the Chinese food industry and suggests that China might consider taking over parts of Africa to feed its massive population.
Deborah Bräutigam, a leading expert on China in Africa and the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, came to Yale to give the MacMillan Center’s Coca-Cola World Fund Lecture on the question: Will Africa Feed China?
Professor Bräutigam, who released a book on this topic in November, immediately warned “there are lots of things out there in the media” that aren’t correct. She alluded to one article that decried a two-billion-dollar Chinese rice investment in Nigeria. When she checked the facts herself, she discovered that China did not in fact make the investment – an Indian basmati rice company did. And it spent two billion Nigerian Naira, which translates to only seventeen million U.S. dollars.
Much of what is published about Chinese involvement in Africa is misinformed, and Professor Bräutigam took it upon herself to “track down the reality” of the claims that China is encroaching on African soil.
“I did forensic Internet sleuthing,” she said. “I tracked down everything I could find.”
Professor Bräutigam and her research team identified 21 possible Chinese projects in Africa. But after screening them – removing old projects, eliminating those that were proposed but never acted upon, and striking purchases by Chinese companies in the 1990s – only four projects remained.
And of those four, not one suggested that China was making land grabs to feed its population.
In fact, a farmer in Mozambique told Professor Bräutigam that anyone who wants to grow soybeans in Africa and sell them in China must “put up with making a loss.” Numerous other ventures have failed because the current African infrastructure would not make the cultivating and transportation of crops to China profitable.
“China has not acquired much land,” she explained. “Only 240 thousand hectares.”
Additionally, Professor Bräutigam found no evidence that Chinese farmers are traveling to Africa to grow food to sell in China. Instead, most Chinese business in the region centers around the selling of agrotechnology. These corporations set up agrotechnology demonstration centers, where they sell their products and teach African men and women how to use them to harvest rice and other crops.
“The people investing in farming in China are not even farmers,” she concluded.
China – anything but a colonizer of Africa – continues to import its food from the Americas, especially Argentina and Brazil.