Agro extractivism inside and outside BRICS: Agrarian change and development trajectories
Over the last decade, Chinese companies have been granted contract. s to develop vast areas of land for agribusiness concessions in Laos. These vast areas, however, rarely come under Chinese company control in full. Analysis of seven Chinese agribusiness concessions finds that a significant gap exists between the large areas initially granted to companies on paper and more modest areas they gain access to in actuality. To understand this gap, this article explores tropes of Laos as having abundant 'empty' 'marginal' or 'underproductive' lands ripe for foreign investment which were used by the Lao government to attract investors, and by investors to justify their projects. It argues that these tropes reflect state and investor views of land, agricultural production, and rural development, which erase the presence of existing land users and complicated systems of overlapping land uses. Furthermore, land regulations and investment procedures in Laos are still developing, and the state institutions implementing them are fragmented by disconnect and internal competition. As a result, in each land deal studied, Chinese investors encountered distinct obstacles to obtaining land, depending upon local politics, systems of land governance in the area and Chinese investor characteristics. These findings complicate common narratives regarding Chinese investors as predatory land grabbers and of host states as passive victims or corrupt rent seekers. Whereas fragmentation among land governance institutions and tropes of rural areas in Laos as empty or underproductive are often studied as tools for extending state power and foreign investor access, in this case they have inflated investor expectations and hidden local level obstacles and barriers to land access which in end have slowed Chinese companies' accumulation of land and resources in Laos. Juliet Lu is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, advised by Dr. Nancy Peluso. She worked from 2009 2011 at the World Agroforestry Centre in Yunnan, China and from 2012 2013 with the Centre for Development and Environment in Vientiane, Laos. Her research interests involve the impacts of China's growing demand for raw materials on land and natural resource management in Southeast Asia, and the political economy of Chinese development cooperation initiatives. Her dissertation research explores the mid 2000s boom in Chinese rubber investments and its implication for land markets and rural development in northern Laos. Dragon heads and paper tigers: discerning Chinese agribusiness investments in Brazil Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira (oliveira@berkeley.edu) The 4th International Conference of BICAS Beijing, P.R. China 2 Abstract Most literature on Chinese agribusiness investments abroad treats "China" as a homogenous entity with coherent, consistent, and state directed interests and business strategies. However, such accounts ignore how the processes by which Chinese agroindustrial capital "goes out" to places like Brazil is very heterogeneous and highly uneven, featuring a wide spectrum of institutional actors and strategies, and yielding starkly different results in terms of capital accumulation and agroindustrial restructuring. I reveal how a few state owned agroindustrial conglomerates undertook mergers acquisitions (M&As) to successfully access Brazilian land, commodities, infrastructure, labor, and expertise. In contrast, I discuss how several other Chinese enterprises failed to establish similar M&As or launch successful direct investments of their own. In particular, I examine China Tobacco International (tobacco) ChemChina (seeds and agrochemicals) and COFCO (soy, maize, sugar, cotton, and coffee) and contrast their processes of transnationalization and capital accumulation with the failed negotiations and projects pursued by multiple other companies operating in similar regions and sectors in Brazil. How and why do these different companies succeed or fail at formulating and undertaking effective investment strategies? I propose that their success hinges on substantial state capital to acquire access and control over Brazilian and transnational agribusiness expertise, bypassing social opposition and legal restrictions on foreign investments (particularly on farmland) Thus, I also investigate how Brazilian agribusiness actors, state agents, and civil society organizations have been able (or unable) to capture, regulate, transform, or even block these multiple flows of Chinese agroindustrial capital. I argue that Dragon Head (i.e. leading) enterprises adopting strategic partnerships with transnational capital enables their integration of a specific class of transnational agribusiness professionals managers, lawyers, traders, infrastructure and agroindustrial engineers, and environmental licensing specialists who already operate profitably; while Paper Tigers (i.e. failed enterprises) rely on Chinese staff and direct but tenuous partnerships with Brazilian agribusiness and government actors launching new projects. Consequently, Brazilian state and corporate attempts to channel Chinese agribusiness investments have largely failed to propel their own goals and priorities, and even though popular resistance and some state regulations may have been somewhat effective against the Paper Tigers, they have largely overlooked and failed to engage with the main flows of capital of the Dragon Heads. I draw on 27 months of fieldwork on Chinese agribusiness investments in Brazil from 2011 to 2015, including (1) dozens of extended interviews and informal conversations with key agribusiness and state actors, (2) dozens of interviews with social movements, NGOs, and others contesting these projects, (3) field site inspections, (4) state and corporate documents and reports related to the investments and negotiations discussed, (5) extensive research of media sources and local archives, and finally, (6) engagement with the relevant secondary literature. This research speaks ultimately to the new and contested processes of agroindustrial accumulation emerging within and between Brazil and China, including their relation to global trade, investment, and inter state relations; impacts on and resistance from smallholders, social movements, NGOs, and state regulatory agencies; and articulation with mainstream development models and alternatives within the BRICS. Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira is PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. His dissertation focuses on Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness and related infrastructure, geopolitics of the BRICS, hegemony, transnational class formation, and the political ecology of agro industrialization. Oliveira has also researched the transnational soybean sector, land governance, and biofuels in Brazil and beyond. He is member of the Land Deal Politics Initiative, the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies, and guest editor with Susanna Hecht of a special issue on "Soy Production in South America" in the Journal of Peasant Studies. Traveling technocratic rationality: Historical review of China Africa agricultural cooperation Xu Xiuli (xxl@cau.edu.cn) The 4th International Conference of BICAS Beijing, P.R. China 3 Xiuli Xu is an associate professor of College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China. Her research interests are China's overseas investment and aid. Her recent publication is Science, Technology and the Politics of Knowledge: The case of China's Agricultural Technological Demonstration Centers in Africa, World Development, Vol. 81, pp. 82 91, 2016. The evolving nature of Chinese land based investments in Myanmar post transition Siu Sue Mark(suemark.yangon@gmail.com) Abstract With Myanmar's re entry into the international market after its transition from a military to a multiparty government in 2011, new forms of transnational capital are returning to the country from the West that shape the state's relationship with the market in new ways. Given the sensitivity created by sanctions that have only been recently lifted, these new forms of capital appear to be offering more socially and environmentally attractive investment terms relative to those offered by foreign investors dominant under the military regime led by the Chinese. At the same time, the transition emboldened the polity to claim the rights articulated by their leaders, albeit superficial in some cases. On the ground, public protests for past and on going land confiscations intensified, particularly over land confiscations initiated in the military era (1988 to 2010) a time in which many Chinese investments were approved. In response to the "pull" of new investments and the "push" of public pressure, Myanmar's reformist state forces are attempting to put into place policies that will favour some types of capital over others, particularly those that can raise the social and environmental standards on investments broadly.With Myanmar's re entry into the international market after its transition from a military to a multiparty government in 2011, new forms of transnational capital are returning to the country from the West that shape the state's relationship with the market in new ways. Given the sensitivity created by sanctions that have only been recently lifted, these new forms of capital appear to be offering more socially and environmentally attractive investment terms relative to those offered by foreign investors dominant under the military regime led by the Chinese. At the same time, the transition emboldened the polity to claim the rights articulated by their leaders, albeit superficial in some cases. On the ground, public protests for past and on going land confiscations intensified, particularly over land confiscations initiated in the military era (1988 to 2010) a time in which many Chinese investments were ap