From an economic standpoint, Chinese investment in farmland has impeccable logic. One oft-cited statistic is that China has 20% of the world's population and just 9% of its arable land.
China suffers from chronic drought and desertification, and has compounded its problems in recent decades by polluting the land or paving it over in a headlong rush toward economic development. The Ministry of Land and Resources in December revealed the results of a five-year study (previously kept secret): 8 million acres of farmland, or roughly 2% of the country's arable land, is too polluted for farming. (one report claims more then 10% of the land is polluted by Chinese standards.)
From exploding watermelons to cadmium-tainted rice, both the result of excessive fertilization, domestic food scandals have made foreign-grown foods more popular in China.
"We want to bring American sunshine, land and water back to China," said Zhang Renwu, a businessman who owns two farms in Utah growing alfalfa to feed dairy cows.
Chinese companies are acquiring farmland where they can — many countries ban the sale of land to foreigners — or forming partnerships with farming enterprises overseas.
When China's largest pork producer, Shuanghui International Holdings, last year paid $4.7 billon for its U.S. counterpart, Smithfield Foods Inc., it also acquired more than 100,000 acres of farmland in Missouri, Texas and North Carolina. (Virginia-based Smithfield didn't disclose how much farmland was covered by the purchase, but just one subsidiary had reported it owned more than 100,000 acres in the three states.)
These investments are contentious both at home and abroad. The Chinese government is sensitive to criticism that it has allowed too much farmland to be paved over for apartments and shopping malls and that it has dragged its feet on long-overdue changes to modernize agribusiness.
Communist Party doctrine maintains that the country should provide itself with 95% of its own grain, and Mao Tse-tung preferred to let people starve in the 1960s rather than import food. Although President Xi Jinping has backed away somewhat from quotas for grain self-sufficiency, the underpinning ideology remains.
Smaller Chinese entrepreneurs have leased farms across the border in Russia as part of a deal with Moscow. Unlike in Africa, where the employees are local, Chinese have crossed the border into Russia as well. At least 30,000 Chinese farmers were reported to be working last year in Birobidzhan, the Siberian region carved out in the 1930s by Josef Stalin as a Jewish Autonomous Region.
the main issue is the inefficiency of farming in China today. According to figures compiled by his association, imported rice, corn, wheat and soybeans are all less expensive than the China-grown crops.
"Farming in China is backward. Most farmers are over 50 years old, poorly educated and trying to earn a living on 10 mu [1.65 acres] of land,"
Although China's agricultural output is the largest in the world, only about 15% of its total land area can be cultivated. China's arable land, which represents 10% of the total arable land in the world, supports over 20% of the world's population. Of this approximately 1.4 million square kilometers of arable land, only about 1.2% (116,580 square kilometers) permanently supports crops and 525,800 square kilometers are irrigated.[21] The land is divided into approximately 200 million households, with an average land allocation of just 0.65 hectares (1.6 acres).