nrupatunga
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For Chinese farmers, a rare welcome in Russia's Far East
Fourteen years ago, Chinese businessman Li Demin was asked to help bail out a struggling pig farm in the Russian trading city of Ussuriysk, close to the Pacific coast in the Far East. Li, chairman of the Dongning Huaxin Group, a private trading firm based in Heilongjiang province across the border, reluctantly agreed - but on one condition.
"At the time I was trading and wasn't at all interested because I knew nothing about raising pigs. So I said I would only buy if they threw in 500 hectares," Li told Reuters. In the end, the local government offered to lease Li more land than he asked for, and more was to come. Now stretching 40,000 hectares and expected to expand further, Li's farm near Ussuriysk is the biggest in Russia's Far East and one of the largest foreign-invested agricultural projects in the country. It raises 30,000 pigs a year and grows soybeans and corn that is sold in local markets or shipped back to China.
It seems to be a natural fit. Russia's Far East Federal District, a region two-thirds the size of the United States, has a population of just 6.3 million and wide swathes of unfarmed fertile land. China is next door, its 1.4 billion people have an insatiable appetite for crops and produce, and chinese companies have gone as far as Australia, South America and the Pacific island of Vanuatu to lease farmland.
Unlike most other parts of the world, the local population, cut off from Russia's western-facing economy, mostly welcomes Chinese investment, which has provided a lifeline following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chinese firms already lease or control at least 600,000 hectares of land in the Far East, which is equivalent to the size of a small U.S. state like Delaware. The investments could surge if the political masters in Moscow were more accommodating.
Russian fears of Chinese encroachment in its underpopulated Far East have eased since the 1990s, but while Russia has vowed to rejuvenate the impoverished region, it is still reluctant to rely entirely on China. Unfortunately for Moscow, the Chinese remain the only ones willing to invest.
But the problem was that the local population had dwindled, and those left behind were mostly unwilling to do agricultural work, Li said.
"This is how I see it: if Chinese labor left the Russian Far East, the region would grind to a halt," he said. "Take our pig farm: Russians don't like pigs and we can't find people to work on it and we can only hire Chinese to do it."
The Chinese businessman, who did not want to give his name, said local residents and government officials understood the necessity of cooperation, but Moscow continued to impose visa restrictions that made it harder to resolve the significant labor and skills shortages in the region.
"We think these rules shouldn't apply to the Far East - we really find it hard to get visas for qualified staff, drivers, traders who understand our business, and it is impossible to find skilled local workers. Russia wants to develop its Far East but it cannot do it without Chinese workers."
"I think the Russians need to understand that if they don't allow Chinese investment or Japanese investment or Korean investment here, they will actually lose the place," he said.
Despite the problems, Chinese investment still seeks to come to the Far East. Moscow itself would prefer a more diversified range of investors, but firms from Japan or South Korea are much more reluctant to get involved.
