UKRAINE – China ‘to rent five per cent of Ukraine’

Ukraine is rich in arable land (Photo: ALAMY)

Ukraine has agreed to a deal with a Chinese firm to lease 5% of its land to feed China’s burgeoning and increasingly demanding population, it has been reported. …

Under the 50-year plan, China would eventually control three million hectares [11,583 square miles — a hectare is a metric unit of square measure primarily used in the measurement of land], an area equivalent to…Massachusetts, which represents nine per cent of Ukraine’s arable land. Initially 100,000 hectares [386 square miles] would be leased.

The farmland in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region would be cultivated principally for growing crops and raising pigs. The produce will be sold at preferential prices to Chinese state-owned conglomerates, said the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (XPCC), a quasi-military organization also known as Bingtuan.

XPCC said on Tuesday, Sept. 24, that it had signed the $2.7 billion agreement in June with KSG Agro, Ukraine’s leading agricultural company. KSG Agro however denied reports that it had sold land to the Chinese, saying it had only reached agreement for the Chinese to modernize 3,000 hectares [11.6 square miles] and “may in the future gradually expand to cover more areas.”

Any sort of “land-grab” deal can be highly sensitive politically. Madagascar was forced to scrap a plan to lease 1.2 million hectares to South Korea in 2009 after angry protests against “neo-colonialism.” The Philippines has also blocked a China investment deal. …

With its current population of 1.36 billion predicted by the UN to rise to 1.4 billion by 2050, China is among the leading renters of overseas farmland in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, though the XPCC deal would make Ukraine China’s largest overseas farming center.

China consumes about one-fifth of the world’s food supplies, but is home to just nine per cent of the world’s farmland, thanks in part to rapid industrialization.

China (green) and Ukraine (orange) on a world map.

“As urbanization speeds up, consumption has led to greater food demand and domestic grain prices have stayed above global prices,” Ding Li, a senior researcher in agriculture at Anbound Consulting in Beijing, told the South China Morning Post. “Therefore, China has been importing more and more grain.”

Apart from China, India, South Korea, the Gulf states and western European corporations began taking tracts of land, especially in Africa, after global food prices spiked in 2008.

XPCC however is making the first such major foray into continental Europe. [Ukraine] has the largest land area in the continent and was known as the “bread basket as the Soviet Union” but which has progressed slowly since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

“The special thing about Ukraine is that there is so much land and so much food left, so there is not a danger of shortage. They already export a lot of grain that they cannot consume on their own,” said Christina Plank, co-author of a report by the Transnational Institute on “land-grabbing.”

CANADA – Cargo Ship Carves a Path in Arctic Sea

A coal-laden cargo ship is on track to become the first bulk carrier to traverse the Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic waters, blazing a trail that shippers hope will become a time-saving route in global trade.

Traveling with a Canadian Coast Guard escort, the Nordic Orion underscores Ottawa’s recent efforts to bolster a thin presence in its vast Arctic territory. Experts say the country already has fallen behind Russia, which is developing a series of Arctic ports and has a fleet of ice breakers keeping open its competing Northern Sea Route.

The vessel, which left Vancouver Sept. 17 carrying 15,000 metric tons of coal, is…expected to dock in…Finland [this] week [the week of Sept. 30th] after chugging through waters once choked almost year-round with thick sea ice.

In recent years, the Arctic region has drawn interest on the international stage as [a period of warming temperatures] makes access to resource development easier and opens these trade routes to more ships, even as questions remain about the Canadian sea lane’s commercial viability. …

Last year, the amount of Arctic sea ice reached an all-time low of 3.42 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles), though this year it rose to 5.10 million square kilometers, according to the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center. …

Bulk Partners (the holding company that owns Nordic Orion) said Nordic Orion’s route will shave off four days of travel time, or nearly 1,500 nautical miles, worth up to $200,000 in savings. The dry-goods shipper said despite additional expenses on this journey, being the first across the route, it went ahead due to strong Canadian government backing.

“We had the support of people in the government there to do it, and without them, honestly, we could not have done it, nor would we have,” Bulk Partners CEO Edward Coll said. [read more under “Background” below]

INDIA – High Commission returns to typewriters

The Indian High Commission [Indian embassy] in London has reverted to using typewriters to compose sensitive documents in the wake of the NSA [United States’ National Security Agency] spying scandal.

(The news briefs above are from staff reports posted at London’s Daily Telegraph on Sept. 24 and Sept. 27, and The Wall Street Journal on Sept. 25.)