Hundreds of farmers in northwest China are expected to toil the
soil in the neighboring Republic of Kazakhstan next spring, a local
agricultural official said yesterday.
"We have signed a deal with Kazakhstan to rent 7,000 hectares of
land in Alakol county for use for 10 years," said Sulitang
Dosimuhan, an official in Yili Kazak Prefecture of the Xinjiang
Uygur Autonomous Region.
Some 3,000 Chinese farmers will flow into the land, arable but
mostly deserted since 1990s, to grow soybeans, wheat and breed
animals in the next three years, the deputy chief of the
prefecture's Agricultural Bureau said in a telephone interview.
Alakol in Kazakhstan is vast in area but sparsely populated. It
needs additional hands to further develop its agriculture industry,
local sources said.
The Kazakhstan Embassy in Beijing was not available for comment
yesterday.
Yili, Alakol's close neighbor, has a surplus rural workforce, as
1.7 million farmers work on 266,600 hectares of arable land,
Dosimuhan said.
The land use agreement comes, in part, as the result of improved
political and business relations between
China and Kazakhstan, experts said.
Both are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - an
international body founded in 2001. Chinese President Hu Jintao
visited Kazakhstan in June.
Trade volume between China and Kazakhstan amounted to US$1.37
billion in the first eight months of this year, or 79.6 per cent
more than last year, customs statistics indicate.
Dosimuhan said the harvest will be sold either in Kazakhstan or
outside.
Hu Feng, director of a Sino-Kazakhstan joint venture created last
month to oversee the agricultural project, said he hopes the
project will benefit both countries.
Apart from agriculture, the Alakol-based company will also work
to develop construction and tourism sectors in the area, he
said.
(China Daily December 18, 2003)