China's Plan for African Food Bowls

China's plan to modernize Africa's agriculture received much praise and fanfare at a China-Africa agricultural cooperation forum held in China's Hainan Island this week. 

The "Plan for China Supporting Africa’s Agricultural Modernization" (along with plans for the continent's industrialization and personnel training) was unveiled by Xi Jinping at the August BRICS forum in South Africa. The plan includes technology transfer by Chinese experts, building a China-Africa tropical agriculture R&D center, establishing a China-Africa R&D innovation alliance, training African technicians and managers, and promoting China-Africa trade in agricultural goods. 

China implies that its plan is superior to western approaches to aiding Africa. The plan's preamble announces that "China is ready to further explore new pathways of agricultural cooperation with Africa." China bills its plan as "south-south cooperation": one "developing country" helping other developing countries, but it also calls for marshalling international organizations to join the plan: the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program, and International Fund for Agricultural Development and calls out several NGOs as potential partners. 

The Chinese plan includes approaches copy-and-pasted from its domestic agricultural development plans:

• "Food security" is one of the buzz words in the plan, including a goal of helping Africa achieve self-sufficiency in grains (sounds familiar). The objective of "stabilizing food bowls" in Africa evokes Xi Jinping's dogma of "keeping Chinese food bowls firmly in their own hands."
• The Chinese plan for Africa features a Chinese favorite: "demonstration projects" and "poverty-reduction villages"--highly subsidized Potemkin villages that impress visitors but could never be replicated without heavy subsidies.
• A featured technique being transferred to Africa is the lining of crop rows with plastic sheeting, a technique that has resulted in "white pollution" of frayed plastic blowing around rural China
• A liberal arts professor from China Agricultural University gushes about teaching a technique that alternates rows of corn and soybeans in fields. This technique is currently being tried out in China and requires expensive specialized equipment and big subsidies. It has not been proven successful in China.
• Big, shiny processing plants are constructed with subsidized loans, whether there is a market for the product or not, creating excess capacity and unserviceable debt.
• Agribusiness companies are induced to open operations in remote impoverished regions by cajoling and subsidizing them as a poverty reduction measure.
• Building up "industry chains", agro-industrial parks and value-added are being tried out in China now and are unproven strategies.

A "green channel" will be established to export African agricultural products to China (In China, this refers to waivers of highway tolls and stall fees in wholesale markets and expedited inspections). The plan calls for boosting China-Africa agricultural trade to $20 billion annually, establishing links between African free trade zones and Chinese bonded warehouses, and building cross-border warehouses to facilitate trade.

Group photo of the Second China-Africa Agricultural Cooperation forum
Source: China Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

Vietnam has a vaccine; China doesn't

Vietnam has a vaccine for African swine fever (ASF). China does not. 

ASF is a virus that spreads quickly and causes hemorrhaging and death in most infected pigs. ASF first jumped from Europe to China in 2018. Then the virus jumped over the Chinese border to Vietnam within months after it had reached China. Swine herds were decimated in both countries. 

Scientists in Europe and elsewhere had been working on ASF vaccines for many years. Yet by early 2020--about 18 months after the country's first outbreaks--China's Harbin Veterinary Institute said it had developed a vaccine for ASF that was safe and effective. The vaccine was a live attenuated vaccine created by deleting genes from the virus. The Institute bragged on its web site: 

“The vaccine is currently the most promising vaccine for industrial application and will provide important technical means for the effective prevention and control of African Swine Fever in China and related countries.” 

Four months later, the Institute reported that the vaccine had been tested on 3,000 hogs with great success. We were told: "More testing is in progress and the institute plans to speed up research and development." The Ministry of Agriculture shortened the required testing period to expedite release of the vaccine.

The next news in early 2021 was that new variants of the ASF virus were spreading across China due to illegal use of unapproved vaccines, and the new variants were missing the same genes that had been deleted to produce the vaccine.

Then...crickets. No news of a commercial vaccine in China.

In July 2023 Vietnam approved two ASF vaccines for commercial use. The Vietnam Government said more than 650,000 doses of the vaccines had been tested on hog herds in 40 provinces, with an efficacy rate of 95%. Trials were suspended due to deaths of some inoculated swine, but they were restarted and completed. The Vietnamese vaccines were released for commercial use several months ago, and arrangements are being made to export them to the Philippines and Indonesia. 

It looks like Vietnam beat China in the race for an ASF vaccine.

China's Harbin Institute--surely embarrassed by this failure--has now fired up its publicity machine again. Deja vu in an October 2023 South China Morning Post article: "A promising new vaccine candidate has been developed by Chinese scientists to combat African swine fever." 

This announcement reported on experimental trials with two groups of 5 pigs each. Sounds like they started all over again, although the researcher said he began the work in 2018. This Chinese vaccine is probably still years away from commercial release.

How is it possible that Vietnam beat its huge northern neighbor? Vietnam collaborated with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service to produce the vaccines. Much of the basic R&D on the vaccines appears to have been done by USDA scientists. The vaccines can't be tested in the United States since there is no ASF in the U.S. Presumably, USDA chose to test the vaccines in a country where the virus was already present. (By developing a safe, effective vaccine, the United States will be ready if/when the virus does reach the U.S.)

China could have had the first ASF vaccine if its scientists and pharmaceutical companies had collaborated with the USDA scientists. But that scenario could never happen because the current Chinese leadership is so obsessed with beating the United States and becoming a "super power" that its scientists must duplicate and reinvent research being conducted in other countries...unless they can steal the technology or buy a company that has the knowhow. And researchers around the world also now know better than to bring their most advanced technology to China since it will inevitably be stolen. 

Thus, productivity lags behind in the world's biggest food producing and consuming country, and China's imports from the rest of the world soar. That's great for exporters but not the most efficient use of the world's soil, water, and grasslands.