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Newsletter
EDITION 16, DECEMBER 2021
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About Rural Funds Management
Rural Funds Management Limited (RFM) is one of the oldest and most experienced agricultural fund managers in Australia. RFM has a 24-year history and operates from a head office in Canberra, and offices in Sydney and Queensland. The company employs more than 100 staff in fund and asset management activities.
Established in 1997, RFM manages approximately $1.5b of agricultural assets. This includes three investment funds for which RFM is the responsible entity. Assets are located across New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria.
The Rural Funds Group (RFF) is RFM's largest fund under management. RFF is an ASX-listed real estate investment trust and owns a $1.2b portfolio of diversified agricultural assets including almond and macadamia orchards, premium vineyards, water entitlements and cattle and cropping assets.
RFM's company culture is informed by its long-standing motto of "Managing Good Assets with Good People". Scan the QR code to learn more.
Contents
Understanding China's food systems
David Bryant, Managing Director
Rural Funds Group update: acquisitions and developments in northern Australia
James Powell, General Manager - Investor Relations and Marketing
Environmental sustainability initiatives being conducted by RFM
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Image: Header harvesting barley at sunset, Lynora Downs, central Queensland, November 2021.
Cover image: Moving cattle on horseback during a snow flurry, Cobungra, Victorian high country, October 2021.
Image: Rice fields among karst formations in the Guangxi region of China.
use only | ||||
Understanding China's | ||||
food systems | ||||
David Bryant, Managing Director | ||||
personal | "Fashion is in Europe, living is in | core priority of government, so that | flour, used in steamed bread and | |
America, but eating is in China." 1 | food consumption can continue to | noodles, the staple of the temperate | ||
bind families and foster friendships. | north. These habits have travelled | |||
China is the world's largest food | with those that made up the diaspora | |||
producer, food consumer and food | Food eaten with others in China | of Chinese in the nineteenth and | ||
importer. Understanding the food | serves social purposes. Sharing | twentieth centuries and, more |
Food consumption is changing
One-third of Chinese consumers in a recent survey rate freshness as their top priority, with only 4% saying "cheapest option available" was most important.2 In Australia, only
9% prioritised freshness, while 17% were focused on price. In China, 90% of consumers said they would pay a premium for healthier food, while in Australia just 51% think this way (see Figure 1).
Of particular interest to readers may be the changes in consumption habits for beef. Two major events affecting this category have been the outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in China, causing a big reduction in pork supply, followed by the outbreak of COVID-19, which changed where people eat.
The shortage of pork from ASF caused pork prices in China to double in late 2019 (see Figure 2). Consequently, demand for beef increased, with corresponding price increases. By the beginning of 2021, pork production recovered and prices dropped to prior levels, but beef prices have remained high. According to a recent Rabobank report,3 this may be because retail demand has formed a solid base, making beef pricing less dependent upon pork, the traditional staple meat protein.
Figure 1: Consumers likely to pay a premium for better quality healthier food in the next 12 months. PwC survey, 2020.2
Figure 2: China weekly pork and beef price, in renminbi (RMB) since January 2019 to November 2021.3
systems and trading opportunities in | a meal with another is used to | recently, with the massive migration |
this country is sensible for investors | establish or maintain relationships. | of people from rural areas to often |
in agricultural assets. A good place | A formal family dinner, which will | distant Chinese cities. |
to begin this task, is to consider the | include close friends, will include | |
nation's food culture. | 4−6 cold dishes and 8−10 hot dishes. | Like most cultures, food is used |
Food culture | Rare and expensive foods can be | in celebration of events, with |
served on occasions to project | mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn | |
wealth and high social status. The | Festival, dumplings for the Spring | |
As one of the world's great | industries that now mass produce | Festival and birthdays celebrated |
civilisations, China has a long and | these rare foods have become huge, | with noodles and peaches. |
Forwell documented history − a history | such as global birds nest production, | Specific foods take on symbolic |
punctuated with periodic famine | made from solidified swiftlet saliva | characteristics, such as peanuts for |
caused by floods, droughts, civil | estimated to be worth $6.5 billion | longevity, oranges and chestnuts for |
wars, foreign invasions and failed | annually. | good luck and glutinous rice balls |
government policy. Millions have died | meaning the family will stay together. | |
from hunger in China within living | Cuisine and eating habits vary | |
memory. Food security, food safety | between regions, with rice a staple | |
and food quality remain to this day a | of the subtropical south and wheat |
Prior to COVID-19, about 70% of beef was consumed outside homes, most commonly at hot pot restaurants, where diners cook sliced beef, beef balls and other meats in a hot pot of flavoured broth. With the onset of COVID-19 and lockdowns, sales in the food service industry dropped substantially, but hot pot revenue only declined 7.5%. This was a result of restaurants adopting home delivery and the supply of packaged instant products. Following the removal of lockdown restrictions, beef sales through supermarkets and e-commerce have remained robust, perhaps evidence of the consumers' newfound mastery of beef consumption at home.
Beef sales, made direct to the consumer through online shopping, have been a feature of the development of Chinese
e-commerce. A decade ago, beef was not consistently available in traditional marketplaces, which provided an avenue for developers of online markets to differentiate, through its offering. With the enthusiastic adoption of online shopping in China, it is thought that e-commerce is now more important than supermarket sales for the distribution of beef. And the future of this industry is bright, with the recent
IPO prospectus for Dingdong Maicai, an aptly named fresh food delivery business, stating e-commerce will continue compound growth at 30% per annum through to 2025.
Land and water
Probably the most significant factor that drove China's exceptionally large population was access to arable land and water supplies that were harnessed for irrigated food production. The consequent reliable and ample food supply enabled population growth, which
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Image: Three Gorges Dam, Yangtze River, Yichang, Hubei province, central China.
Small farms and Hukou
rural residents who wish to stay and work in cities. The system denies
for urbanisation, farmers lack both access to finance and long-term
only
While China's ability to build infrastructure is beyond doubt, its agricultural sector is challenged by two additional and connected characteristics. China's farms are among the world's smallest and are possibly getting smaller as a side effect of the nation's unique household registration system, called Hukou.
It is estimated that there are 200 million farms in China (see Figure 3), with an average size of just 0.43 ha (see Figure 4) and with 92.5% being less than 2 ha.5 Most of the
immigrants access to government services in the cities, such as education, health care and social security. Because rural immigrants residing in cities lack certainty or permanent residency, they have an incentive to retain the family farm, in the event they are forced to return.
An additional feature of China's agriculture is that land cannot be owned by farmers; instead it is leased for periods of around 30 years. Given this finite tenure and the fact that land is frequently resumed
incentive to invest in development of what are very small farms anyway.
Reforms to the country's Hukou system and rural land tenure have occurred from time to time over the past decades, and further reform is required if the country is to achieve greater efficiencies in food production. These requirements are however being balanced by a determination to control migration to a rate that matches urban services and job creation.
For personal use
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paradoxically caused China's land and water supply per capita to shrink.
Producing food for so many people is a challenge because arable land, the stuff on which food can be cultivated, is only 0.8 ha per capita or one-quarter of the global average. To make matters more challenging, two-thirds of China's arable area
is low-yielding fields on hills and mountains.
Freshwater resources per capita are currently 1.9 megalitres (million litres or ML) compared to a global average three times higher, and an Australian resource ten times higher. In the more arid north, water scarcity is acute, with residents of Beijing, for example, restricted to just 0.18 ML per capita in 2020.
Infrastructure projects designed to address water scarcity have been constructed over the past two millennia, with the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, completed in 2012, being a recent example.
This hydro-electric dam includes the world's single largest power station with 22.5 GW of capacity, six times
This hydro-electric dam includes the world's single largest power station"
extracted. The project consists of three routes using canals, pipes and pump stations, to enable the transfer of water from the reliable Yangtze River in the south to drier northern regions.
The eastern route, begun in 2002, incorporates the Grand Canal, a network of interconnected canals completed in AD 609. By 2013, the eastern route was delivering water with additional construction due to take water delivery further north. At completion this route will be 1,150 km long, with 23 pumping stations to keep the water moving along the coastal plain.
The central route began providing water to Beijing from 2014, with further expansion under way. At
1,264 km in length, the completed canal can deliver around 12,000 GL annually, an amount equal to the entire annual extractions from the Murray Darling Basin in Australia. The canal utilises gravity to transport water along its route, which includes two massive tunnels that cross 70 metres beneath the Yellow River.
people who operate or depend on these enterprises for their livelihood are poor and uneducated. Yet this is the group of people tasked with providing a nation of 1.4 billion people with sufficient fresh and safe food to eat.
The combination of the requirement for increasing farm productivity and a poorly educated workforce means that China's agricultural sector is an exceptionally high user of agricultural chemicals. Despite farming just
9% of global cropland,6 Chinese farmers are consuming around 30% of the world's synthetic fertiliser and 43% of global pesticides.7 It is estimated that over 60% of these agrochemical inputs are wasted,8 causing economic inefficiencies and environmental problems.
Studies have found that increasing farm size would provide a reduction in agrochemical use, while increasing farm productivity.9 However, the Hukou household registration system is impeding progress in this regard. While decades of rural migration
to the cities has reduced China's rural population to 40%, 64% of the national population remains registered as rural.
Hukou is a citizen registration and identification system operated like an internal passport system. It is used to control the rate of internal migration of rural residents to cities by requiring permits for registered
Figure 3: Top five countries by number of agricultural holdings and agricultural area.5
Figure 4: Average farm size in China and Australia, 2000.6
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Trade
'I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.'
only | Emperor Qianlong's response to British |
demands for greater trade, 1793.10 | |
In the same year that the 80-year-old | |
Emperor Qianlong rebuffed British | |
trade demands, the British Parliament | |
formalised a monopoly for the East | |
India Company over the opium trade | |
between India and China. This Act | |
accelerated the shipment of opium to | |
China, which began a chain of events | |
and wars that caused more than a | |
century-long national addiction to | |
opium, two opium wars that forced | |
the drug into the country and the | |
denial of tariff autonomy because of | |
the creation of treaty ports. So began | |
China's Century of Humiliation. | |
useHaving experienced trade with | |
personalFor | western characteristics, it is little |
wonder that China seeks autonomy |
today in its trade in food. Following accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, China's imports of agricultural commodities have grown and changed. During
the first decade following this key event, imports of land-intensive bulk commodities such as soybeans, corn and cotton grew ten-fold to around $90 billion per annum but have since flattened. Meanwhile, imports of consumer-oriented foods such as dairy, beef and tree nuts have risen twenty-fold to $80 billion in the past 20 years, with many categories still increasing at rates of around 20% per annum.
Despite impressive growth in imports, sudden changes in trade policy have adversely effected shipments of food to China for
a range of reasons. The recent restrictions on several Australian food exports are an example of seemingly arbitrary change, while changes
in the structure of the infant milk formula (IMF) market is an example of a nation determined to create a level of self-sufficiency in its own food systems.
Manufacturers of IMF have until recently been one of the fastest growing groups of ASX stocks that could be considered agricultural.
However, in recent times sales to China have slumped as a consequence of a 2019 Chinese government plan to increase domestically produced IMF to a 60% market share. In addition, China's births have declined from 17.5 million in 2015 to a forecast of 10 million in 2021.11 While some trade restrictions may appear arbitrary, in hindsight the growth and subsequent slowdown in the IMF market was probably predictable.
Conclusion
As a country with enormous resources, not the least being its people, China is rightly determined to choose whose 'manufactures' it has use for. It is a country with many poor people, whose economic development is a genuine concern of capable technocrats and party leadership. Reform of its agricultural sector will take a long time and regardless of the success or extent of these reforms, demand from
an increasingly prosperous urban population will continue to grow.
Image: An aerial view showing a patchwork of small fields in rural China.
References
- Lin K, Chinese Food Cultural Profile, EthnoMed website, University of Washington, 2000.
- PwC, Rabobank and Temasek, The Asia Food Challenge, The Asia Food Challenge website, 2021.
- Rabobank RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness, A New Era in China's Beef Market, Rabobank website, 2021.
- Xiao F, Seismic activity in the Three Gorges region - 2021 update, Probe International website, 2021.
- Lowder S, Skoet J and Raney T, 'The number, size, and distribution of farms, smallholder farms, and family farms worldwide', World Development, 2016, 87:16−29.
- Wu et al., 'Policy distortions, farm size, and the overuse of agricultural chemicals in China'.
- Xie L, Qiu Z, You L and Kang Y, 'A macro perspective on the relationship between farm size and agrochemicals use in China', Sustainability, 2020, 12(21):9299.
- Wu Y, Xi X, Tang X, Luo D, Gu B, Ke S et al., 'Policy distortions, farm size, and the overuse of agricultural chemicals in China', PNAS, 2018, 115(27):7010−1015.
- Xie et al., 'A macro perspective on the relationship between farm size and agrochemicals use in China'.
- Quoted from Jaivin L, The Shortest History of China, Black Inc., Carlton, 2021.
- Rabobank RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness, Rock'n the cradle: clouds over China's infant formula sector out- look, Rabobank website, 2021.
Image credits
Image: Longsheng Rice Terraces, Longji Rice Terrace (Dragons Backbone) in Longsheng County - Guangxi Province, China.
Newsletter by Rural Funds Management
Rice fields among karst formations in the Guangxi region of China. Creativefamily/Adobe Stock #190089034. Three Gorges Dam, Yangtze River, Yichang, Hubei province, central China. Klodien/Adobe Stock #426438718. Longsheng Rice Terraces, Longji Rice Terrace (Dragons Backbone) in Longsheng County - Guangxi Province, China. Cedar/ Adobe Stock #2556242758. An aerial view showing a patchwork of small fields in rural China. Greg Brave/Adobe Stock #280511305.
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Rural Funds Group published this content on 15 December 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 15 December 2021 05:38:04 UTC.