Book Description

This book critically examines the driving forces, discourses, and conflicts surrounding Chinese investments in overseas farmland, with a specific focus on Australia. With growing amounts of finance channeled into the purchase of overseas food and farming assets, China has become a frontrunner in the global land rush. Unlike much of the existing literature that focuses on emerging economies such as Brazil or Africa, this book examines Chinese farmland purchases in the developed country context of Australia. Based on four years of extensive field work in Australia and China, it traces the encounters and interactions between investors, regulators, deal brokers, farmers, and eaters that shape the ways in which individual Chinese investment projects materialize in the Australian countryside. In contrast to conventional wisdom portraying China’s overseas land rush as a state-led strategy to feed the Chinese population, this book reveals that Chinese investments in Australian farmland have been propelled by the intersecting interests of international finance and business elites looking to cash in on booming Chinese demand for high-quality, Western food products. This book provides a unique transnational perspective on China’s overseas farmland purchases and shows how Chinese farmland investments produce uneven geographies of agri-food globalization that cut across national borders. Through the lens of China’s agri-engagement in Australia, this book advances our theoretical understanding of the new types of power relations and dynamics shaping an increasingly multi-polar agri-food system. This book will be useful to students and scholars of agri-food studies, Chinese studies and globalization with an interest in the global land rush and the shifting contours of the global agri-food system.