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China to lease overseas farmland
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2004-05-24 17:35
In March 2004, an agreement was signed between southwest China's Chongqing
Municipal government and the Lao government to cooperatively build a
comprehensive agricultural park in Laos for Chinese enterprises to produce
grain.
Leasing farmland overseas to produce grain has become a new way for China, a
country with the world's greatest population but comparatively scarce soil
resources, to solve its food supply problem, which has become a focus of the
world.
With an investment of US$4.98 million, the agricultural park plans to cover
an area of 5,000 hectares and consists of a package of seven agricultural
programs including crop planting, fishery and farm produce processing.
"Preferential policies in tax revenue and loans will be offered by the
governments of both sides to attract enterprises to participate in the
agricultural park project," said Wang Jiguang, deputy director of the Foreign
Trade and Economic Committee of Chongqing.
"By 2006 when construction of all the projects are completed, the annual
sales of the park will reach US$7.71 million with an annual profit of US$655,000
and an annual profit tax of US$182,000," said Wang.
According to Wang, who has a doctor's degree of economics in Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences, Chongqing also plans to export 10,000 laborers for the
project.
The project is not the first of its kind in China, Wang said. As
early as 1996, the Suntime International Techno-Economic Cooperation (Group) Co.
Ltd., a listed company in northwest China' s Xinjiang Autonomous Region,
invested US$50,000 in Cuba in developing an area of 150 hectares to grow
rice.
As a result of using improved rice varieties and advanced
agricultural technology, the per hectare yield of the experimental land reaches
as high as 4.8 tons, setting a record yield in Cuba.
The success of the
experiment has encouraged more efforts to be made to produce grain overseas. In
1998, the Suntime Group invested US$3.2 million in purchasing 1,050 hectares of
farm land from the Mexican government. After four harvests, the average per
hectare rice yield reaches five tons, compared with 3.5 tons of the local
farmers in Mexico.
"The two projects are successful examples of overseas
farmland leasing which has not only brought handsome profits for the Chinese and
overseas enterprises but also opened broader prospects for the development of
China's agriculture overseas," said Liu Zhiyong, board chairman of the foreign
economic company of the Suntime Group.
The dilemma for the development of
China's agriculture is its abundance in labor force and farming technology and
its shortage in farming land and water, said Lin Yifu, director of the China
Center for Economic Research at Beijing University.
So leasing farming
land overseas to grow grain has become one of the approaches for China to solve
its food supply problem, Lin said.
"In China, the average per capita
farming land is only 0.095 hectares, while Laos boasts a potential farming land
area of eight million hectares, with only 800,000 hectares have been reclaimed,"
said Wang Jiguang.
Meanwhile, Laos produces high quality rice thanks to
its tropical climate, but its undeveloped agriculture results in the country's
close dependence on the import," said Wang. "So there remains a large potential
consuming market of farm produce in Laos. "
According to Wang, in the
Chongqing-Laos agricultural park, the average per mu yield of hybrid rice seed
can reach 200 kilograms, or 1,000 hectares of land producing 3,000 tons of
high-quality rice.
The park grows about three million mu (200,000
hectares) of hybrid rice, about half of the total rice plantation in Laos, with
its produce sold in Laos, China and other South East Asian countries, said
Wang.
Through cooperating with countries with abundant water and soil
resources and exporting labor force and advanced agricultural technology, China
expects a win-win result for both sides, said Hong Guowei, a top official with
the Chongqing municipal agricultural bureau.
It has been considered a miracle for China, a country with only seven percent
of the world's farming land to feed a population of over 1.3 billion, covering
22 percent of the total population of the world.
In 1995, a report
written by Lester R. Brawn, director of the Worldwatch Institute of the United
States, called "Who Will Feed China: Wake up Call for a Small Planet", aroused a
worldwide panic on the food supply for the huge population of China. But the
high yield of China's farm produce in the following years dispersed the panic
with strong evidences.
However, since 1998, the yield of China's grain
produce presents a continuous downward trend. Only in 2003, the shortage of
three main cereal varieties, wheat, corn and rice reached as much as over 20
billion kilograms as the reduction of the total yield is about 70 billion
kilograms compared with the record produce in 1998.
To solve the grain
problem of China, the Chinese government has taken a series of favorable
measures such as reducing or relieving tax revenue, giving grain subsidy
directly to farmers and building grain bases, and encouraging enterprises to
produce grain overseas by leasing foreign farmland.
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