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 | Monday, April 24, 2000, updated at 09:55(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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China Encourages Greater Agro-Investment in Africa: PaperChina encourages its agricultural companies to intensify their investments in Africa.Continual economic growth in the continent is expected to create new opportunities for Chinese agricultural companies to tap the 30.29-million-square-kilometer market composed of 56 economies, the weekly said. The Chinese Government is encouraging the country's companies to intensify their business integration with African economies and setting up joint ventures with local co-operative partners, as China enjoys good long-term political relationships with them, the paper quoted Chen Xiaoru, an official of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MOFTEC), as saying. "Chinese-invested companies engaged in production of farm machinery, agricultural processing and entrepot trading targeted for the world market will find immense business potential," she said. African economies, as a whole, saw their year-on-year gross domestic product (GDP) growth at 3.1 percent in 1999, and 4 percent growth is likely this year, which will allow them to import more and engage in more overseas economic co-operation, the report said. Agriculture in Africa is largely oriented towards production of coffee, tea, peanuts, wheat, barley and corn, with many of the farms set up and under controls of American and European farmers. Grain was still in short supply on the continent, Chinese experts said. China had helped African countries set up a total of 87 agricultural projects with its donations until early 1980s when it altered foreign economic co-operative policy from sole donation to mutual beneficiary pursuits. With the backing of Chinese bank soft loans, the country's fisheries and other agribusiness companies have gone to 13 African countries to set up 23 fishing projects, operate farms under contracts and to open farm machinery joint ventures dovetailing to local needs since the early 1980s. Statistics indicate that at least 401 State-owned enterprises were set up under approval of the MOFTEC in Africa by the end of June last year, with a 671 million US dollars committed investment reported.
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