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Is China building a new empire in rural Africa? Within the last ten years, China's meteoric rise on the continent has increased a drumbeat of security alarm. China has nine percent of the world's arable land, six percent of its water, and over 20 percent of its people. Africa's savannahs and river basins coordinator the planet's major expanses of underutilized land and water. Few issues are as questionable and emotionally priced as the belief that the Chinese government is aggressively buying up huge tracts of perfect African land to increase food to send back again to China. In Will Africa Supply China?, Deborah Brautigam, one of the world's leading experts on China and Africa, probes the myths and realities behind the advertising headlines. Her careful research challenges the conventional knowledge; as she shows, Chinese farming investments are actually remarkably limited, and land acquisitions modest. Defying objectives, China actually exports more food to Africa than it imports. Is this picture likely to change? African governments are pressing hard for international capital, and China is building a portfolio of tools to permit its agribusiness businesses to "go global". International concerns about "land grabbing" are well-justified. Yet to give food to its growing society, rural Africa must move from subsistence to commercial agriculture. What role will China play? Moving from the halls of ability in Beijing to remote irrigated rice paddies of Africa, Will Africa Supply China? introduces the people and the politics that will shape the future of this engagement: the state-owned Chinese agribusiness businesses that pioneered African farming in the 1960s and the entrepreneurial private buyers who implemented them. Their attractive stories, and those of the African farmers and officials who are their counterparts, floor Brautigam's deeply educational, deftly balanced reporting.
