Culture clash seen with wave of investments
Kelly Hearn
The Washington Times
2/1/2012
Few were surprised when Venezuela announced a deal with China last week to restore 1.4 million acres of unproductive farmland across the oil-rich but impoverished South American nation.
China increasingly is buying farmland and agricultural companies in South America to feed its ever-growing population, currently estimated to be 1.34 billion.
The most important aspect of China’s agricultural investment in Latin America is that “it is a part of the increasing physical footprint of the People’s Republic of China that is just beginning to occur,” said Evan Ellis, an assistant professor at National Defense University in Washington.
Mr. Ellis said that “with the Chinese becoming mine owners, petroleum-field operators, factory managers and dam builders in Latin America,” China’s farming operations there “will immerse the Chinese, with their very different culture, in one of the most politically charged phenomena in the region – the relationship between the Latin American people and their land.”
Central to China’s rising agricultural-industrial complex are soybeans from Brazil and Argentina, millions of tons of which the Chinese are importing to feed cows and pigs to meet a growing demand for meat.
From 2005 to 2011, China’s soybean demand nearly doubled to more than 70 million tons per year, while domestic production declined 10 percent to 14 million tons, according to SinoLatin Capital, a Shanghai-based investment firm focused on transactions between Latin America and China.
China is working to close that deficit by infusing cash into Latin American economies in exchange for allowing Chinese government-owned companies to set up shop and extract basic food goods…
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