China ‘to rent five per cent of Ukraine’
Sept 25, 2013 5:11:29 GMT -5
Post by popcorn on Sept 25, 2013 5:11:29 GMT -5
China ‘to rent five per cent of Ukraine’
Ukraine has agreed a deal with a Chinese firm to lease five per cent of its land to feed China’s burgeoning and increasingly demanding population, it has been reported.
It would be the biggest so called “land grab” agreement, where one country leases or sells land to another, in a trend that has been compared to the 19th century “scramble for Africa”, but which is now spreading to the vast and fertile plains of eastern Europe.
Under the 50-year plan, China would eventually control three million hectares, an area equivalent to Belgium or Massachusetts, which represents nine per cent of Ukraine’s arable land. Initially 100,000 hectares would be leased.
The farmland in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region would be cultivated principally for growing crops and raising pigs. The produce will be sold at preferential prices to Chinese state-owned conglomerates, said the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (XPCC), a quasi-military organisation also known as Bingtuan.
XPCC said on Tuesday that it had signed the £1.7 billion agreement in June with KSG Agro, Ukraine’s leading agricultural company. KSG Agro however denied reports that it had sold land to the Chinese, saying it had only reached agreement for the Chinese to modernise 3,000 hectares and “may in the future gradually expand to cover more areas”.
Any sort of “land-grab” deal can be highly sensitive politically. Madagascar was forced to scrap a plan to lease 1.2 million hectares to South Korea in 2009 after angry protests against “neo-colonialism”. The Philippines has also blocked a China investment deal.
“This reminds us of a colonial process even when there is no colonial link between the two countries involved,” said Christina Plank, co-author of a report by the Transnational Institute on “land-grabbing”.
With its current population of 1.36 billion predicted by the UN to rise to 1.4 billion by 2050, China is among the leading renter of overseas farmland in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, though the XPCC deal would make Ukraine China’s largest overseas farming center.
read more:
Ukraine has agreed a deal with a Chinese firm to lease five per cent of its land to feed China’s burgeoning and increasingly demanding population, it has been reported.
It would be the biggest so called “land grab” agreement, where one country leases or sells land to another, in a trend that has been compared to the 19th century “scramble for Africa”, but which is now spreading to the vast and fertile plains of eastern Europe.
Under the 50-year plan, China would eventually control three million hectares, an area equivalent to Belgium or Massachusetts, which represents nine per cent of Ukraine’s arable land. Initially 100,000 hectares would be leased.
The farmland in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region would be cultivated principally for growing crops and raising pigs. The produce will be sold at preferential prices to Chinese state-owned conglomerates, said the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (XPCC), a quasi-military organisation also known as Bingtuan.
XPCC said on Tuesday that it had signed the £1.7 billion agreement in June with KSG Agro, Ukraine’s leading agricultural company. KSG Agro however denied reports that it had sold land to the Chinese, saying it had only reached agreement for the Chinese to modernise 3,000 hectares and “may in the future gradually expand to cover more areas”.
Any sort of “land-grab” deal can be highly sensitive politically. Madagascar was forced to scrap a plan to lease 1.2 million hectares to South Korea in 2009 after angry protests against “neo-colonialism”. The Philippines has also blocked a China investment deal.
“This reminds us of a colonial process even when there is no colonial link between the two countries involved,” said Christina Plank, co-author of a report by the Transnational Institute on “land-grabbing”.
With its current population of 1.36 billion predicted by the UN to rise to 1.4 billion by 2050, China is among the leading renter of overseas farmland in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, though the XPCC deal would make Ukraine China’s largest overseas farming center.
read more:
