Chinese Agricultural and Land Investments in Southeast Asia: A Preliminary Overview of Trends

As BRICS-led foreign investment in agriculture has increased dramatically worldwide in recent years, China in particular, has begun to secure huge quantities of foreign land as an additional measure for securing future food and energy supplies. While an increasing amount of academic research has been conducted on the expansion of land deals in Latin America and Africa in recent years, Southeast Asian cases are just beginning to receive significant attention and have become the focus of some emerging academic and non-academic research. This paper offers a preliminary overview of some of the recent trends in agricultural and land investments that have developed, which involve Chinese companies in Southeast Asian countries. It also makes some tentative comparisons with other regions, highlighting the differences and similarities arising between Chinese investments in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. The characteristics of five of the most prominent companies investing in Southeast Asia are also discussed and framed typologically in order to ground the discussion of trends at a more micro level. This overview can provide a useful, broader contextualisation for the many recent and on-going case studies that focus either on specific land deals or particular countries in the region. The interplay between public and private (or state and corporate) actors both from China and Southeast Asia, and the circumstances under which these linkages emerge are also explored.

Available for download

Working Paper