Everyday Encounters Across the Chinese Agricultural Value Networks in Zambia
Jessica Achberger, Solange Chatelard, and Jessica Chu
Southern African Institute for Policy and Research
This paper is a preliminary examination of Chinese agricultural value networks through the perspective of everyday encounters, particularly small and medium entrepreneurial investors. Increasingly, the notion of Chinese agricultural investments as ‘land grabs’ is being dispelled, and instead there has been a reinterpretation of Chinese investments in Zambia as smaller in scale than other foreign agricultural investments. However, in recognizing this difference, there remains a question about why the Chinese farmers choose to migrate to Zambia and how their migration is acted out in a number of different socio-economic settings.
This research uses ethnographic fieldwork and key informant interviews from various points of the Chinese agricultural value chain, including producers and agribusinesses, market places, and places of consumption (such as Chinese restaurants). By mapping the connections associated with the Chinese migrants, what forms out of value chains are, instead, value networks. Such networks are used to explore the connections between migrants, the relationships that move across these spaces, and how different forms of encounters inform our understanding of Chinese agricultural investment, the daily interactions between the Chinese and Zambians, and wider socio-economic change.
The interactions described in this exploratory paper represent several years of fieldwork in and around Lusaka by the researchers, which both confirm and challenge the original assumptions about Chinese agricultural investment. In the encounters we describe, the food produced by Chinese farmers acts both as a commodity and a form of cultural identity and exchange. Most importantly, what these encounters demonstrate, whether at the farm, in the marketplace, or in the restaurant, is that there is much more to be understood about Chinese agricultural entrepreneurs in Zambia.
