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.