Several years ago, when food prices started rising sharply, triggering riots from Bangladesh to Yemen, stories began circulating about massive Chinese land grabs in Africa. In Zimbabwe, a Chinese company was said to have leased a quarter of a million acres to grow maize for export to China, even while hunger stalked Zimbabwe itself. In the impoverished and anarchic Democratic Republic of Congo, ZTE, a Chinese telecoms company keen on diversification, was apparently investing in a 3m-hectare palm oil plantation. Chinese businesses were said to control most of Zambia’s fertile farmland.
If the stories were to be believed, across the continent Chinese companies were engaged in a co-ordinated effort to take control of agricultural land to feed their ever more prosperous people back home.
It was not the first time that fears had surfaced of land-focused neocolonialism emanating from Beijing. As long ago as 1966, Fulbert Youlou, the first president of Congo-Brazzaville, wrote that China “would in due course turn the entire continent into a gigantic rice field”. So far that hasn’t happened. Deborah Brautigam’s interesting, thorough, if narrowly focused book Will Africa Feed China? sets about explaining why it is not likely to occur any time soon.