China will push forward the opening-up of agriculture, including promoting agricultural product export, deepening trade with countries along the Belt and Road, supporting agricultural sector's "going out", and cultivating large agricultural enterprises for international competitiveness, according to the "No.1 central document" of the year released on Feb.4, charting the roadmap for rural vitalization.
Common aspiration by countries along B&R
Agricultural exchanges and trade have been the main contents of the Silk Road since ancient times. In the new era, agricultural development remains an important basis for economic development of the Belt and Road countries, most of which desiring to address hunger and poverty and ensure food security and nutrition.
According to a report by Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2016, agriculture accounts for a large share in the economic system of the countries along the Belt and Road, much higher than global average. In particular, the ratio of agriculture in GDP has exceeded 20 percent in countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Laos and Cambodia. However, in terms of yield per unit area of farmland, the average grain output in countries along the B&R is far below that in developed countries.
On May 12, 2017, on the eve of the opening of Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs jointly released the Vision and Action of Jointly Promoting the Belt and Road to Build Agricultural Cooperation, which called on cooperation on five aspects including establishing agricultural policy dialogue platform, strengthening agricultural technology exchanges and cooperation, optimizing agricultural trade cooperation, expanding agricultural investment and cooperation, strengthening capacity building and people-to-people exchanges.
Going-out opportunities for agricultural sector
In fact, many Chinese provinces and regions have conducted fruitful and mutually-beneficial cooperation with countries along the Belt and Road. For example, China's western provinces and regions, based on dryland farming, established cooperation with Central Asian countries in fields such as grain, animal husbandry and cotton. Northern provinces and regions engaged in cooperation of grain and vegetable planting in the far east of Russia, while southern provinces and regions, based on tropical agriculture, worked with Southeast Asian and South Asian countries on grain and tropical cash crop planting.
In recent years, the opening-up of China's agricultural sector not only resulted in increase of import, but also drove the going-out of Chinese agricultural enterprises to invest overseas. For instance, Uzbekistan used to face serious soil salinization. Scientists from the CAS then introduced Xinjiang's salt-tolerant wheat varieties to Uzbekistan for local planting. Eventually, grains are grown in places where local people thought impossible, with even higher wheat yield than that of fertile land.
In African countries, currently some large Chinese agricultural enterprises tend to invest in large scale plantations in countries like Tanzania, Senegal and Zambia, or to plant crops such as rice, cassava and sesame in other countries.
By farming overseas, agricultural enterprises have achieved new production bases, said Li Guoxiang, a researcher of Rural Development Institute at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), adding that the agricultural projects along the Belt and Road also led to the export of Chinese technologies, equipment and labor services.
The countries along the Belt and Road have strong desire to strengthen agricultural cooperation with China. While China, which has reached a high level of technical maturity in various fields, have large space for such cooperation during its process of agricultural structure adjustment, said Tang Shengrao, deputy head of the international cooperation department of the MOA. (Edited by Niu Huizhe, niuhuizhe@xinhua.org)
A single purchase
