China Looks Abroad for Farmlands

choi

Barbara Demick,  China Looks Abroad for Greener Pastures; With 1.3 billion people to feed in a nation grappling with tainted food and polluted land, Chinese companies are investing in farmland overseas. Los Angeles Times, Mar 29, 2014.
www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-foreign-farmland-20140329,0,5992574.story

Quote:

"When China's largest pork producer, Shuanghui International Holdings, last year paid $4.7 billon for its US counterpart, Smithfield Foods Inc., it also acquired more than 100,000 acres of farmland in Missouri, Texas and North Carolina.

"In a paper published in 2012, the Canada-based International Institute for Sustainable Development confirmed the existence of 54 Chinese projects overseas covering almost 12 million acres. (Land Matrix, an activist group that compiles information on the sale of farmland, found nearly double the amount of overseas land being farmed by the Chinese.)

Note:
(a) "When Ma Wenfeng was a boy, his father earned so little money growing wheat and corn that the family mainly ate mantou, a steamed bread that is a staple of the poor. * * * Ma, who works as an analyst for a Beijing-based trade association, CnAgri. * * * He believes 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."
(i) Why? Because there is no neat inside mantou?  Or is it a hyperbole?
(ii) CnAgri--China Agriculture Consultant  艾格农业
www.boabc.com/
(成立于1996年; 北京市)

(b) "In Australia, a Chinese-led consortium acquired a sprawling 200,000-acre cotton plantation known as Cubbie Station, complete with what is said to be the largest irrigation system in the Southern Hemisphere."

Cubbie Station
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubbie_Station
(sold in 2012 to a joint venture led by Shandong RuYi Group  山东如意集团 [山东省济宁市])

(c) "Legend Holdings, the parent company of computer maker Lenovo Group, formed a subsidiary called Joyvio 佳沃集团 in 2012 to grow fruit abroad. Joyvio has invested in operations in Chile growing blueberries, kiwis and grapes"
(d) "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, according to figures released during a trade fair last year in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang."

Birobidzhan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birobidzhan
(a town and the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast; section 1 Name and geography)