​China’s Flexible Overseas Food Strategy: Food Trade and Agricultural Investment between Southeast Asia and China in 1990-2015

​Event Type: Seminar

Event Date: 4 September 2018 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Venue: ASE 3-D Visualization Lab (N2-B1c-16c)

Speaker: Zhan Shaolu

About the speaker:

Shaohua Zhan received his doctoral degree in sociology from the Johns Hopkins University and is now an assistant professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University. He studies rural development, food security, land politics, and labor migration in China and beyond. His works have appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies, World Development, Journal of Rural Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Geoforum, Studies in Comparative International Development, The China Journal, Modern China, etc. His forthcoming book examines the contrasting development paths of industrious revolution and agrarian capitalism in rural China.

About the event:

Using the UN Comtrade database and multiple sources of agricultural investment data, this paper outlines the emerging patterns of food trade and agricultural investment between Southeast Asian countries and China. The paper shows that China has adopted a flexible overseas food strategy. First, China has increased food export and shifted its food trade with Southeast Asia from a dependent relationship toward a complementary relationship at the regional level in recent years. Second, China tends to adapt to the existing conditions of food production and trade in Southeast Asian countries instead of fundamentally altering them. Finally, Chinese overseas agricultural investment is less driven by domestic food demand but more oriented for profit making, and this gives it flexibility in diversifying investment. An adequate understanding of China’s flexible food strategy in bilateral and multilateral relationships holds implications for global environmental sustainability and food security.