Chinese rice imports at the port of Dakar, Senegal. China is exploring ways to feed its growing population using food grown in Africa. Photo by: vredeseilanden / CC BY-NC
Recently colleagues at Devex published a story about what China's move away from grain self-sufficiency means for African agriculture. Curiously, they illustrated this story with the photo and caption above, of a pile of 50kg bags of rice ... coming INTO Senegal. Devex said these imports are from China. As the Ameropa label shows, this is unlikely. Ameropa is a Swiss multinational with a branch that specializes in importing Asian rice for African markets. The rice in this photo was probably sourced in Vietnam or Thailand, not China. As our recent SAIS-CARI conference on Chinese agricultural investment in Africa pointed out, China is not exploring ways to feed its growing population using food grown in Africa. At least, not yet.
I wrote my first book analyzing the problems and challenges faced by Chinese rice projects in West Africa (Chinese Aid and African Development, 1998), so this is a special interest of mine. Here's what is going on in Senegal -- excerpted from an excellent analysis by Senegal, with 13 million inhabitants, is the world's tenth biggest importer ...
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