China's farming sector is following the manufacturing sector as another hot arena favored by foreign investors.

More than US$10 billion in overseas investment has poured into the farming sector, introducing many crop strains, domestic animals, seeds and saplings as well as scientific and technological breakthroughs benefiting farming over 20 years, says Lu Liangshu, an agricultural expert and honorary chairman of the Chinese Association of Agro-Science Societies.

China has opened further wider its agricultural sector to the outside world and quickened the pace of overseas investment in the sector since it entered the World Trade Organization late last year.

An international seminar and investment fair designed to attract more overseas investment to the agricultural sector, which had lagged far behind manufacturing in this respect, opened on Thursday in Yangzhou city in east China's Jiangsu province.

The seminar has drawn 450 business people from 28 countries and regions worldwide.

Jiangsu province, one of China's major rice and silk producing regions, promoted nearly 1,000 agricultural investment projects, covering farming, forestry, gardening, animal husbandry, aquaculture and agricultural machinery, at the seminar.

The province expects to see agreements signed on more than 250 projects involving a total investment of US$1.2 billion during the on-going seminar and fair.

Jiangsu approved 242 overseas-funded agricultural projects in the first eight months of this year, involving a total investment of US$783 million. Contractual overseas investment totaled US$666 million, with actual investments so far of US$215 million, according to information from the provincial agriculture and forestry bureau. Shanghai, one of China's leading economic and commercial centers, has so far approved over 660 overseas-funded agricultural projects, involving more than US$1.2 billion in contractual foreign investment.

East China's Fujian province had absorbed US$3.94 billion in contractual overseas investment into its farming sector by the end of last year. The amount used reached approximately US$1.7 billion.

Of Fujian's total overseas-funded agricultural projects, more than 1,400 are funded by Taiwanese businesspeople, to date involving US$1.05 billion in actual Taiwanese investment.

Meanwhile, overseas investors get big profits from the agricultural projects they pour their funds into.

The Fenglin Foodstuff Co., Ltd., solely funded by a businessman from the Republic of Korea (ROK), is engaged in in-depth processing of onions, scallions (green onion) and garlic products.

The deep-freeze onion juice produced by the ROK company, located in Donghai county in Jiangsu province, is sold for nine yuan (about US$1.1) per kilogram in ROK, as compared with the manufacturing cost of 0.8 yuan to one yuan.

Products made by overseas-funded agricultural businesses accounted for more than 50 percent of Jiangsu's total exports of farm produce and byproducts last year, according to the provincial agriculture and forestry bureau.

The Chinese government has made it a major task to restructure the agricultural and rural economy which serves the purposes of improving agricultural performance and raising the farmers' income, while maintaining a sound ecology.

This means an increasing number of business opportunities for overseas investors, agriculture experts say.

(Xinhua News Agency October 26, 2002)