In China, the vast land is in the countryside. The problem is that under Chinese land regulatory regime, rural land shall not be used for industrial or commercial development other than growing crops and building houses for farmers.

With the rapid urbanization of rural area and expansion of urban city, many farmers have left their farmland to seek their luck in cities and as a result, quite a lot of farmland is left idle or not fully used. There is an enormous need to upgrade China’s agricultural production from individual proprietary production to large-scale production. Recent years have seen such progress in eastern China provinces like Zhejiang, Jiangsu.

In response to such trend in reality, local governments have shown strong interests to boost and bolster that tendency by offering a package of favorable treatments to lure investors.

Foreign investment in agricultural sector has been on the encouraged list of the Catalogue for Guiding Foreign Investment in China for many years, such as growing vegetables and other crops that can be used to produce cooking oil.

Take the village where I come from for example, recently, some farmers have agreed to lease their farmland to one investor from Shandong province for build big greenhouses for growing vegetables such tomatoes, cucumbers. Such greenhouses often cover more than one thousand (1,000) square meters. The investor will lease such greenhouses to farmers who are willing to grow vegetables with the technical assistance provided by such investor.

Personally, I still think that kind development is somehow backward in terms of organization of production. Since there is still a lot of farmland that remains under individual proprietorship, I hope there will be institutional investors coming up to invest in my hometown to further develop and upgrade the agricultural production there which has remained unchanged for decades.