Australia Just Stopped China Buying a Farm the Size of Kentucky

You can have too much foreign investment, it seems.

The Australian government Thursday blocked the sale of a portfolio of farmland the size of Kentucky to Chinese investors on national interest grounds.

Four separate groups linked to Chinese-based investors had been dominating the bidding for properties amounting to 2.5% of Australia’s farming land owned by S. Kidman & Co. The assets were expected to fetch an estimated 350 million Australian dollars ($250 million). The proposed sale had become a test case for how the country balances concerns over foreign ownership with the need for foreign investment in an economy that has slowed sharply due to the collapse in commodity prices this year.

Treasury Secretary Scott Morrison blocked the sale from going ahead “as currently proposed” because a large part of the leased land is within the Woomera Prohibited Area, a weapons testing site in the state of South Australia. Morrison’s decision followed a recommendation from the country’s Foreign Investment Review Board.

“Plainly the Woomera Prohibited Area is called the ‘prohibited area’ for a reason,” Turnbull told reporters on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Conference summit in Manila. “It is actively used for weapons testing and trials and it’s an area that obviously raises national security issues.”

Australia’s concerns about foreign ownership aren’t limited to China–it’s only two years since the previous government stopped Archer Daniels Midland Inc. buying GrainCorp, a big producer and trader of grains and oilseeds. However, Chinese investment raises more hackles because of its human rights and governance record, as well as the lack of reciprocal rights for Australian investors in China.

Turnbull denied suggestions of anti-Chinese discrimination, saying that there was interest from more than one country. He added that there’s nothing to stop the family that controls S. Kidman from restructuring the sale to exclude the sensitive areas.

China’s apparently insatiable appetite for industrial commodities such as iron ore and coal had driven a 20-year boom in Australia, making it one of its Australia’s biggest trading partners, with two-way trade of over A$150 billion last year. The combined stock of inward investment from China and Hong Kong, meanwhile, is now over A$115 billion. But China’s slowdown has had a big impact in Australia, leading to widespread job cuts in the mining industry, the bursting of a property bubble, and a sharp fall in the country’s currency. The dollar has risen by over 30% against its Aussie counterpart in the last 15 months.

But if China’s refocusing of its economy away from heavy industry has savaged the mining industry, it hasn’t stopped its scramble for farming assets. Chinese groups have bought aggressively in South America, Africa and Australasia to satisfy rising demand for grain, milk and meat. Increasingly, they are facing opposition from groups who worry that their influence is spreading too far. Last month, New Zealand had blocked the sale of a large-scale sheep- and cattle-station to Shanghai Pengxin, one of the disappointed bidders for S. Kidman’s leases.

 

They should do like the criminals in America, sell them the whole country and everything in it, then borrow a couple extra trillion dollars for good measure.

 

China on the move...

 

Maybe Arizona should have thought about that.

Saudi Hay Farm In Arizona Tests State's Supply Of Groundwater

Outside of Phoenix, in the scorching Arizona desert, sits a farm that Saudi Arabia's largest dairy uses to make hay for cows back home.

That dairy company, named Almarai, bought the farm last year and has planted thousands of acres of groundwater-guzzling alfalfa to make that hay. Saudi Arabia can't grow its own hay anymore because those crops drained its own ancient aquifer.

Reporter Nathan Halverson tells NPR's Renee Montagne that Almarai bought about 15 square miles in the Arizona desert.

"They got about 15 water wells when they purchased the property. Now, each one of those wells can pump about 1.5 billion gallons of water. It's an incredible amount of water they're going to be drawing up from that aquifer underground," Halverson says.

The land in question had previously been under cultivation for corn, cotton and other crops, including smaller amounts of alfalfa for hay, he tells The Salt. Halverson's sources told him that the farm is now consuming significantly more water, since alfalfa is a particularly thirsty crop.

Halverson, along with producer Ike Sriskandarajah, visited that farm for a story for Reveal, an investigative radio program and podcast from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.

 

Years ago on "Doonesbury" Garry Trudeau had a Chinese child asking his father if he could be excused from the dinner table. The father said, "But you haven't touched your jellied duck's web yet."

The child said, "But Daddy, I don't like jellied duck's web."

The father said, "You don't like jellied duck's web? Think of all the starving children in West Virginia. They would love to have your jellied duck's web."

 

The laws were put in place in the ‘70s, and kudos to Arizona — they were really one of the first states to put in groundwater laws. But the laws were really designed for local or domestic farming. The idea that another country would come and essentially export your water via crops just wasn’t really around 30, 40 years ago. And so the laws that are in place are really inadequate for dealing with this new trend.

This is occurring in a part of Arizona that is unregulated for groundwater. So there are no limits on how much water they can pump.

No one we talked to has issue with these corporations coming in and wanting to make money. And the fact that it’s going to Saudi Arabia or China, the locals simply didn’t care. But what they did care about is that their water tables are falling. So their domestic wells that they use for their homes are increasingly dropping, and at some point, they’re going to lose access to water.

I think this is a very new issue. I think people are just waking up and recognizing that they are exporting huge amounts of their water overseas, even during a drought. And so I think folks are just reconciling with this issue, and folks are grappling with what it means. But the paramount need for them is access to water. Without it, there is no living in the desert.

 

Is there anything that the united states won't sell to a foreign country? Shit half of America is probably owned by the chinese, including a shit load of land. Maybe that's why the BLM is trying so many land grabs here lately........

 

Exactly.....Be it water or soil nutrients those are natural resources that are (granted though seeming unbelievable) irreplaceable and limited. It doesn't seem as such being a crop or meat, yet it is not the end product. It is what it took to grow that product.

Hush....an alias

 

I wouldn't let it bother you too much comrade, you may have lost half of your country to foreigners but you make it up by acquiring a fair wack of my country....both land and businesses.

 

Yeah, i don't think any of us are getting out of here alive.