With steady implementation of the "Belt and Road" Initiative, China's cooperation with countries along the modern Silk Road on agricultural industry has come to a multilayer level. Thanks to adjacent geological location, similar resource endowment and complementary agricultural product structure, exchanges and cooperation in the agricultural field have increasingly become a focus of attention among countries along the modern Silk Road.
Agricultural cooperation is gradually become a "vanguard" and "new engine" in the economic construction along the Silk Road Economic Belt, said many officials, experts and businessmen at the Silk Road International Exposition, or the 20th Investment and Trade Forum for Cooperation between East and West China (ITFCEW) held in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province.
For example, located in the Yangling Agricultural High-tech Industries Demonstration Pilot Zone, Yangling Lead Biology Science & Technology Co., Ltd invested in and built a grass planting base covering an area of 100,000 mu (about 6,666 hectare) in Kyrghyzstan in 2014. Now, the base comes into service. It is a win-win move, which cannot only create job opportunities and tax revenue for the local, but also stabilize grass prices in the domestic market, according to a person of the company.
Nowadays, more and more Chinese agricultural enterprises have "gone global" and invested in the countries along the Belt and Road. According to incomplete statistics, 551 Chinese investment institutions have carried out the agricultural investments and cooperation in more than 80 countries and regions and established 1,157 enterprises, accounting for 4.5 percent of the total overseas enterprises set up by the domestic enterprises.
Their outbound agricultural investments totaled 7.179 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 10.9 percent of China's outward foreign direct investments. In addition to the growing scale, China's agricultural cooperation with the countries along the Belt and Road has also seen an expansion in fields and an improvement in industrial chain. Their cooperation covers planting, animal husbandry and fishery and focuses on industrial chains of production, sales, storage and logistics, said Qiu Huanguang, an expert at the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Renmin University of China.
At the ITFCEW, former Kazakh Prime Minister Sergei Tereshchenko said that since last year, the Kazakh side has worked with the side of Yangling, Shaanxi to plant wheat. Meanwhile, the organic apple and other organic fruits planted by them will be supplied to the Kazakh, Chinese and Russian markets.
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