Reaping the harvest

CHENG WANDONG/FOR CHINA DAILY

The eighth session of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation will be held in Senegal in the coming weeks. The FOCAC was launched in 2000. It's worth reviewing how its policies on agricultural cooperation have evolved over the past 20 years.

The keynote speeches by Chinese leaders and action plans jointly issued by China and Africa at every FOCAC meeting have always identified agriculture and food security as priority areas for China-Africa cooperation. Because of its rapidly growing population and vulnerable farming conditions, food shortage is becoming more and more serious in Africa. Meanwhile, agriculture is the backbone of many African countries' economy, with about 58.02 percent of Africa's population living in rural areas. FOCAC's primary goal is to help Africa achieve food security and enhance Africa's capacity to address its food issues independently.

Africa enjoys huge development potential and obvious comparative advantages in agriculture. Agriculture has been an important part of economic and production capacity cooperation between China and Africa. In other words, there are two layers of agricultural cooperation between China and Africa--on food security and the basic needs of African people, and economic cooperation which can drive the African economy forward and explore the cooperation potential between China and Africa.

Besides, agricultural cooperation between China and Africa has adopted an approach of combining aid, trade and investment. In fact, cooperation has gone beyond the scope of aid and expanded to commercial cooperation on agricultural investment and trade. Funds for aid are limited and aid activities will possibly end some day, but commercial cooperation can be more sustainable in effect and broader in scale. With this philosophy, China and Africa have agreed to encourage the export of African agricultural products to China and increase Chinese investment in Africa's agricultural sector.

For example, China-Africa Cotton Development Co has invested and is operating in countries such as Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Through the operation model of "company plus smallholder farmer", this company has directly employed more than 3,300 locals and indirectly prompted 40,000 to 50,000 farmers to plant cotton, benefiting more than 200,000 local people. At the seventh FOCAC meeting in 2018, China announced its decision to expand imports of non-resource products from Africa, and selected cotton and sugar, two cash crops with great potential for China-Africa cooperation, as cooperation priorities.

Also, the content of China-Africa agricultural cooperation has been enriched, thanks to a deeper understanding of how to develop agriculture. Initially focused on agricultural production, cooperation has gradually expanded to post-production activities such as processing, storage and transportation of agricultural products, inspection and quarantine, and has continued to expand to sharing and exchanges of agricultural development policies. Thus, China has helped African countries build grain warehouses and other storage facilities to reduce post-production losses, construct rural roads and trading facilities to facilitate the circulation and sale of farmers' harvests, and start up processing factories to increase the added value of agricultural products. And the notion of promoting comprehensive rural development in Africa was first put forward at the 2015 FOCAC meeting. The seventh FOCAC meeting in 2018 incorporated the cultivation of local African human resources and enterprises into the cooperation agenda.

China's agricultural aid to Africa has always focused on innovation. Under FOCAC, China has continued its traditional agricultural assistance to Africa and made further innovations, and the most prominent case was setting up agricultural technology demonstration centers, with the aim of achieving sustainable effects of agricultural aid programs through the long-term operation of enterprises in Africa. By the end of 2019, China had assisted African countries in setting up 22 such centers. Another innovation has been the dispatch of senior agricultural technical experts, who are mainly responsible for sharing China's experience in agricultural development plans and policies with African countries. In addition, Chinese aid has helped African smallholder farmers with their agricultural activities, rather than replacing Africa's own agricultural development with aid projects.

Technology transfer has been the core of China-Africa agricultural cooperation. In its cooperation with Africa, China has always held that "teaching someone how to fish is better than giving that person fish".Not only have the aid projects included the function of technology transfer, Chinese enterprises have been encouraged to play an active role. Furthermore, the 2015 FOCAC meeting further proposed the initiative of cooperation between China and Africa's agricultural research institutions, while the 2018 meeting agreed on the joint development of new technologies and the sharing of China's advanced agricultural technologies.

The two sides' agricultural cooperation has been based on full respect for Africa's development needs and willingness to cooperate. The cooperation measures have always synergized with Africa's own development plans, such as the New Partnership for Africa's Development, Agenda 2063 and the Comprehensive Agricultural Development Plan for Africa. And China-Africa coordination and communication on agriculture has been gradually institutionalized. At the 2018 meeting, it was announced that China would work with Africa to formulate and implement an Action Plan for China-Africa Agricultural Modernization Cooperation, and establish the China-African Union Agricultural Cooperation Committee.

Guided by FOCAC, China and Africa have worked together to actively implement cooperation measures in agriculture and carry out all-round cooperation, which has vigorously accelerated the agricultural modernization process of Africa and improved its food security. The complementary advantages and cooperation potential between China and Africa in agriculture have been further unleashed, and helped achieve mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation.

The author is senior research fellow and deputy director of the Institute of West Asian and African Studies at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn