Today is a public holiday in South Africa – Human Rights Day. There’s a certain irony in spending the day focusing on China’s President Xi Jinping’s visit to Vladimir Putin, knee-deep in a human rights disaster.
What one makes of the Ukraine crisis increasingly maps on where one lives. This is made clear by a remarkable new set of polling data recently published by the European Council on Foreign Relations ...
Category: Agriculture
China Ramps Up Brazilian Corn Imports
A ship carrying 51,200 tons of corn became the first Brazilian vessel to dock at Jiangyin Port on the Yangtze River, with ships from the agricultural giant delivering 2.4 million tons of grain in total. The delivery comes as Brazil (the second largest corn exporter in the ...
U.S. Panic About Chinese Land Grabs Echoes Africa
Recent reports in the right-leaning press in the United States claim that China is escalating purchases of American farms. This drumbeat is partly in support of the proposed Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security (PASS) act. The bipartisan measure would block investments ...
Fun Fact: China’s Unexpected Corn Boom
Many would be surprised to hear the results of new research showing that China now produces more corn than rice. And its need for biofuels, starches and animal feed is so big it also imports huge amounts from other corn producers like Brazil.
Will Infrastructure Boost African Growth? Maybe Not, Says Economist
The Kenyan economist David Ndii published a fascinating paper casting doubt on one of the most fundamental assumptions in Africa-China relations: that the key to boosting growth is infrastructure. Ndii, a prominent critic of the ‘first build a road’ infrastructure-focused orthodoxy, ...
Commodity Exporters in Developing Countries Fret as China’s Worsening COVID Outbreaks, Protests Prompts Sell-Off
Commodity sellers in Africa, the Middle East and the Americas are becoming increasingly anxious over the situation in China, where days of street protests and COVID outbreaks across the country are weighing down the price of their key exports.
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
Xi Bets on Global South in Moscow
Kenyan Purple Tea Wows Hunan
The first shipment of 240 kilograms of a rare kind of Kenyan purple tea has arrived in Hunan province. The tea, which is a clear lilac color when brewed, is only the latest African agricultural commodity processed in Changsha, Hunan. The province is setting ...
Kenyan Avocado Exports to China Gather Speed
A 24-ton shipment of Kenyan avocados arrived in China’s Guangzhou harbor this week. It took years for Kenyan producers to clear import protocols, but the shipment shows that China is finally moving forward with its pledge to increase agricultural imports from Africa via so-called ...
Netting Investment Flows? Why Aquaculture Has Been Slow to Catch on in Chinese Overseas Investment
By Rebecca Ray China’s demand for imported seafood is booming, projected to double by 2030. Domestically, consumer demand is primarily satisfied by aquaculture, the raising of aquatic plants and animals for food, but the sector has stagnated as the Chinese government tightened environmental regulations. Its deep-water ...
First Avocados, Now Coffee Beans… Kenya’s Expanding Agricultural Exports to China
A first batch of 2.04 tons of raw Kenyan coffee beans arrived in the southern Chinese city of Changsha this week, marking the opening of yet another new market for Kenyan agricultural exports in China. The shipment arrived on Friday on ...
Hunan’s Growing Clout in African Agricultural Trade Now Extends to Honey
The Chinese province of Hunan this week ran online courses in beekeeping and honey processing for African farmers. Hunan is quickly emerging as the world’s most innovative hub for African agricultural trade, with a cocoa trading center, a currency clearing hub and numerous trade deals with different ...