Chinese engagement in African agriculture is not what it seems

The reality of Chinese investment in African agriculture has yet to catch up with the hype. Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko

On Zimbabweland this week, I want to share an article that appeared in The Conversation, and various other outlets, last week. It relates to our work on China and Brazil in African agriculture, mentioned before on this blog.

Chinese engagement in African agriculture is not what it seems…..

In December 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping flew into South Africa for the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation with great fanfare. There were lots of announcements about prospective investments across Africa. Agriculture featured prominently. But what is the real story of China in Africa on the ground, beyond the hype?

As Deborah Brautigam’s investigative research has so effectively shown, the assumptions about China’s role in Africa are often not borne out in reality. The level of investment and linked aid flows are much lower than the high numbers sometimes touted; the numbers of imported Chinese workers are much lower than often suggested; the areas of land “grabbed” for investment are small compared to the vast areas identified by some.

And, as Brautigam’s recent book shows, Africa will not be feeding China or China feeding Africa anytime soon.

Reality on the ground

We set about finding out what was happening on the ground. Working with African, Chinese and European colleagues, our team investigated Chinese engagements in agriculture in four countries – Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. All have featured prominently as priorities for Chinese investment and aid.

Our just-completed project is reported in a new open access special issue of the journal World Development. So what exactly has been going on?

This proved surprisingly difficult to find out. The data on land acquisition, investment flows and aid projects is limited and confusing. It often doesn’t add up. Ghost projects are listed that never happened, and others are missed out.

Our original idea of doing a simple geomapping exercise based on available data was quickly abandoned. Instead, we had to triangulate between multiple sources to find out what was happening where.

Certainly there is a great deal going on, and the Chinese presence in Africa is important. The Chinese role in agriculture – in terms of business investment, technology transfer, demonstration efforts, training and more – is growing, and shaping perceptions.

We chose cases across the four countries to investigate in more detail. The studies aimed to explore the detail of investments, technology projects, training and development encounters more generally.

The central question we asked was: is China reshaping African agriculture?

No singular ‘Chinese model’

The Chinese Agricultural Technology Development Centres are flagship investments. There are now 23 across Africa, funded in their first phase by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce under their aid program. They are run mostly by companies, and are linked to a commercial model for training and technology demonstration and sale.

As Xiuli Xu and colleagues show, the centres’ performance very much depends on who is running them. Different provincial companies have very different characteristics, demonstrating that there is no singular “Chinese model” of development, or state-business partnership.

We also explored a number of cases of business investments in agriculture, primarily led by Chinese state-owned enterprises. Chinese development efforts mix aid with commerce, linking both provincial and central state involvement with different businesses.

For example, as Jing Gu and colleagues explain, in Xai Xai in Mozambique, the Wanbao agricultural development company from Hubei province took over 20,000 hectares on a state farm to farm rice, and develop a contract farming arrangement with surrounding farms.

It has not been easy. There have been a number of changes in company leads, disputes with local communities, and shifting alliances with local elites, as Kojo Amanor and Sergio Chichava set out.

The training of government officials is an important aspect of the Chinese engagement in Africa. More than 10,000 are trained in numerous courses in China each year, many in agriculture. This far exceeds any training initiative of any western aid programme.

Henry Tugendhat and Dawit Alemu explored the impacts of these courses, participating in training in China, and interviewing officials who had returned home to Ghana and Zimbabwe. While there have not been many immediate impacts, the longer-term building of relationships and the exertion of “soft power” diplomacy is important.

The role of informal Chinese migrants

Chinese migrants supply specialist Chinese foods to burgeoning expatriate populations.
Reuters/Noor Khamis

Perhaps the most far-reaching but least understood dimension of Chinese involvement in African agriculture is the growing number of informal migrants getting involved in the agri-food sector, from farming to processing to retail to restaurants.

Seth Cook and colleagues investigated this in Ethiopia and Ghana. They discovered a range of activities: relatively few farmers, but growing investment in supplying specialist Chinese foods to burgeoning expatriate Chinese populations.

Those involved are very often migrants who came as part of Chinese government contracts, and have since established business connections and stayed, encouraging others to join them from China.

Through our work, we were able to gain a snapshot of the early stages of Chinese engagement in African agriculture. Our results show successes as well as failures. But Chinese engagement is certainly not yet at the scale sometimes assumed.

In the longer term, activities may accelerate as more opportunities open up. But China is also changing. As its economy restructures to a “new normal”, there are different demands. Food will certainly remain one, but this is not likely to come from Africa.

As a new global power, China will want to maintain business, aid and diplomatic relations with Africa, and sustaining relationships will be important. China plays the long game, and our studies were observing just the opening stages.

Ian Scoones, Professorial Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Back to normal service next week…..

Are China and Brazil transforming African agriculture?

A new Open Access Special Issue in World Development based on our work on the changing role of China and Brazil in Africa’s agriculture is now available (links to individual articles are below, and also via here).

The work was developed under the ‘China and Brazil in African Agriculture’ project of the Future Agricultures Consortium. The project was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (grant: ES/J013420/1) under the Rising Powers and Interdependent Futures programme.

The research involved studies in Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, as well as China and Brazil. There were over 20 research collaborators involved, from Africa, China, Brazil and Europe, and it was a massively rich, if sometimes challenging, experience. Our research looked at 16 different case studies, involving a mix of agricultural investments by private and state owned enterprises, tri-lateral development cooperation efforts, technology demonstration initiatives, training programmes, as well as ‘under-the-radar’ involvement in agriculture by Chinese migrants.

There was no single story emerging, but a complex set of engagements, which contrast in important ways with existing patterns of western-led development and investment, and offer important opportunities for reflection and learning. These 8 papers (along with over 20 other Working Papers on the project website) are the result. Do download, read and send us feedback! It’s been a lot of work putting them together!

Ian Scoones, Kojo Amanor, Arilson Favareto and Gubo Qi	A new politics of development cooperation? Chinese and Brazilian engagements in African agriculture
Kojo Amanor and Sérgio Chichava	South-South cooperation, agribusiness and African agricultural development: Brazil and China in Ghana and Mozambique
Jing Gu, Zhang Chuanhong, Alcides Vaz and Langton Mukwereza	Chinese state capitalism? Rethinking the role of the state and business in Chinese development cooperation in Africa
Alex Shankland and Euclides Gonçalves	Imagining agricultural development in South-South Cooperation: the contestation and transformation of ProSAVANA
Lídia Cabral, Arilson Favareto, Langton Mukwereza and Kojo Amanor	Brazil’s agricultural politics in Africa: More Food International and the disputed meanings of ‘family farming’
Seth Cook, Jixia Lu, Henry Tugendhat and Dawit Alemu	Chinese migrants in Africa: Facts and fictions from the agri-food sector in Ethiopia and Ghana
Henry Tugendhat and Dawit Alemu	Chinese agricultural training courses for African officials: between power and partnerships
Xiuli Xu, Xiaoyun Li, Gubo Qi, Lixia Tang and Langton Mukwereza	Science, technology and the politics of knowledge: the case of China’s Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centres in Africa

The papers examine how agricultural technologies, practices and policies travel across the world as part of investment and development cooperation. Technologies and policies always have histories, and emerge in particular social and political contexts. Yet China and Brazil both argue that theirs are perhaps especially relevant to Africa, given common agroecological conditions, and similar histories of agricultural development. We were interested in finding out how things travelled, and what happened during the journey.

Of course the transfer of technologies and policies, as we’ve long known, is not simple or linear. Assumptions are often deeply embedded (such as what a farmer is, what scale is appropriate, and how different sorts of technology are important), but they do not always translate into new contexts. Not surprisingly, despite the claims, not everything generated in Brazil and China has landed easily in Africa. There have been rejections, resistances, and so revisions and recastings; all of which highlight the importance of ‘development encounters’ and the negotiations about knowledge (and technology, practice, policy) that must go on during development cooperation – whether with a western aid agency or with Brazilian and Chinese actors.

Together, the papers show how historical experiences in Brazil and China, as well as domestic political and economic debates, affect how interventions are framed, and by whom, and so influence what technologies are chosen, which investments are funded, and who gets trained. The papers argue for a focus on the encounters on the ground, moving beyond the broader rhetoric and generic policy statements about South-South cooperation. For example, a key feature of Brazilian and Chinese engagements in African agriculture is the role of state-business relations in shaping and steering development; something that other agencies such as DFID interested in the role of the private sector, and public-private partnerships, might usefully learn from.

The special issue asks if a new paradigm for development cooperation is emerging, and argues that we must move beyond the simplistic narratives of either mutual benefit and ‘South-South’ collaboration or ‘neo-imperial’ expansion of ‘rising powers’. As the introductory paper argues, we need a more sophisticated account than this simplistic binary, and to “look at the dynamic and contested politics of engagement, as new forms of capital and technology enter African contexts”.

Do read, share and comment on the papers. We hope they will generate a debate about the role of the ‘rising powers’ in African development, and help us move towards a more nuanced appreciation and away from the rather simplistic frames that have dominated the debate to date.

 This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland

 

SDGs: Will they make a difference?

This week heads of state assemble in New York to launch the Sustainable Development Goals. The agreed text lays out 17 goals and 169 targets. It is an ambitious agenda for all of humanity.

But will they make any difference? We have had the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were launched with similar fanfare in 2000. These focused on ‘development’ and ‘poverty’, but were similarly high-sounding. Promoted heavily by Jeff Sachs, bed nets, vaccines and agricultural technologies were going to save the world. Big money from international donors and philanthropists came behind them, but did they make a difference?

I must confess I was a deep cynic in 2000. The ‘aid’ frame of the MDGs meant that implementation was subject to the usual top-down impositions, and there were many limitations, with the added burden of the target-oriented audit culture, and all the distortions this creates. Was aid going to be a saviour or just a sticking plaster, unable to address the real structural causes of poverty and inequality? Did the MDGs just reinforce a world order where underdevelopment was the consequence of capitalist power and control in some parts of the world? Maybe.

So what happened since 2000? There have been major changes in the world economy, and with this geopolitics. The old aid frame with western nations and rich philantrophists from the US setting the agenda has gone (or at least partially). The declines in aggregate poverty achieved since then were not largely the result of MDG interventions at all, but the growth of China (and also India, parts of Latin America and more recently some countries in Africa). These changes were not driven by goals and targets, or village pilot projects such as Sachs’ much criticised Millennium Villages, but by economic aspiration, capitalist expansion and growth.

But I must admit that my cynicism for the MDGs has waned over 15 years, and this gives me hope for the SDGs. There are a number of reasons.

Investment linked to MDG targets has in some places resulted in significant gains. Ethiopia was one country for example that took the MDGs seriously. The statistics are impressive. Child mortality is down by two-thirds from 1990, and various other targets – on women’s empowerment, nutrition and food insecurity – have been met. Yes, there have been distortions – sometimes a blind focus on a target, forgetting the wider picture – but the effect has been galvanising. A commitment to a new state-led developmentalism is especially apparent in Ethiopia, the inheritance of the late Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, but it’s evident elsewhere too. In a period when the neoliberal mantra has been the economic discipline, the retreat of the state and reliance on the private sector and voluntarism, the efforts of states like Ethiopia, committed in partnership with international donors to United Nations ambitions, is impressive.

Perhaps most importantly, the MDGs opened up a political space for a debate about development. The UNDP’s MDG ‘campaign’ was important in keeping a development agenda on the radar of governments around the world, and Salil Shetty was a great initial champion. These commitments were amplified, extended and supported of course by the major efforts of NGOs and civil society groups, around ‘Make Poverty History’, and other campaigns. Without such collective action and political pressure, the temptation to cut aid budgets in the face of the late 2000s financial crisis would have been even greater. The summits and grand UN meetings may have been performative circuses, but they have also provided a focus for advocacy and challenge. The politics of global summitry can be one where new ideas emerge, creating spaces for more radical alternatives. Moving beyond the target culture and shifting towards generating globally-agreed norms for policy and action – as has happened around human rights, women’s rights and the environment – is perhaps a more appropriate focus for advocacy, rather than getting hung up on all the goals and targets, while still keeping governments to account around key themes.

In a period of financial crisis, austerity, inward-facing nationalist politics and a geopolitics overtaken by the ‘war on terror’ post 9/11, the MDGs were in some way an important counter, offering a more internationalist vision of development, and a confirmation of the UN ideals. Fifteen years on, I have emerged with a somewhat less cynical view. But what of the SDGs? Might these offer the same? Just maybe.

If you read the document you will probably despair. It’s full of high-flown rhetoric and grandiose statements – most of which are rather meaningless hot air and grand gestures. Great fodder for the cynic. But I think if we (largely) forget the goals and targets (except as politically useful tools), and focus on the wider politics of the SDGs, we can see (perhaps) some radical potential. There are five things that might help assuage the cynic in me.

First, again, the launch this week, and the continued presence of the goals, agreed by all nations, opens up a political space, as the MDGs did in 2000. Like then, it will have to be followed up by an energetic campaign, and radical voices will need to enter the debates to keep governments on their toes. Today, the broader conditions for a new argument for development are even less promising than in 2000, so we need to catch the moment, and make the case.

Second, and this is emphasised repeatedly in the agreement document, the SDGs are universal – for all nations. This is not a ‘development’ document, with the unequal relations between ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ inscribed. Instead, this is as relevant to the UK as it is to Zimbabwe, and accountabilities and commitments must work in all directions. This is an important departure from the MDGs that had the old (post-colonial) aid framework at the core. Recently the SDGs were discussed in the UK Parliament, but in the wrong committee. The SDGs are not just the concern of the International Development Committee but of all government. SDGs should be discussed under Home Affairs, as well as development.

Third, the explicit linking of sustainability and so environmental concerns, especially climate change, is vital. Long-term, sustainable development cannot forget this. The MDGs pigeon-holed environmental issues, and did not see them integral to all development. Bringing sustainability centre stage is crucial, as the world negotiates a future in the context of climate change. In terms of UN efforts, it also brings development (UNDP) closer to environment (UNEP), and so makes the connections that have been attempted repeatedly in Stockholm, Rio, Joburg and Rio again.

Fourth, what is needed here, along with the wider ‘campaign’ for sustainable development is what emerged from the 1992 Rio Summit on Environment and Development – a local level movement for sustainable development, based on practical change on the ground. Back then it was called Agenda 21. Remember that? Agenda 21 petered out and sustainable development became increasingly the domain of global summitry and COP events associated with climate change. But without practical enactments of sustainability, and a radical realisation of what it means in different places, the big ambitions will fall flat.

Fifth, a new developmentalism, linked to a universal commitment to an internationalised solution amongst the community of nations, gives the UN a pivotal role. As a new Secretary General is sought, I hope that whoever is appointed will keep these visions central and push member states to match their signing up to the SDGs with consistent financing and concerted action in line with the goals. This will not just mean carping at the failures of so-called developing nations, but will mean keeping developed nations to their word. As the UK imposes yet more austerity measures that affect poor people and ethnic minorities most harshly, at the same time as cutting support for transitions to green energy, will David Cameron, a great supporter of the SDGs, take note?

Green transformations involve politics, and require both high level goals, but most crucially organised collective action. As we discussed in the book The Politics of Green Transformations these may occur through a variety of processes, being led by technology and innovation, state intervention, market reforms or citizen actions. Lessons show that sustained transformations to sustainability require political coalitions between groups through mobilisation across sites and scales. If the SDGs are to have meaning it is this new politics that will make the difference, and not getting hung up on the many goals or targets.

This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland