New Zealand

There are always concerns surrounding foreign ownership, but they're about the wider issue of land ownership and not specifically about China, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said after talks with Chinese Vice-President Xi Jingping

A lawyer advising the NZ Government how to make it easier to sell assets overseas is working for the Chinese company wanting to buy the Crafar farms, the Green Party says.

NZ government-owned farming company Landcorp may bid for 16 big farms at the centre of controversy over their potential sale to a Chinese-backed investor.

The NZ Super Fund is "going hard" on the acquisition trail for stakes in prime New Zealand assets like rural land, state-owned enterprises, smaller high-growth companies and iwi businesses.

A German investment fund that bought a majority interest in a Southland dairy farm, Aquila Capital's AgrarInvest, also has shareholdings in three other Kiwi dairy companies.

Mr Rosslenbroich is particularly enthusiastic about agriculture, where he says Aquila has “teams travelling the world looking for farms”, with New Zealand dairy farms a speciality.

Southern NZ farmers will want to see cash before agreeing to sell their farms to a foreign company again, having been burnt once by a deal that turned sour.

Someone needs to put Fonterra and the Feds into the same room.

The Chinese-backed company seeking to buy 29 North Island dairy farms is also trying to buy up to 100 farms in Otago and Southland and build a dairy factory in Southland.

There is serious overseas interest in acquiring New Zealand farmland, and some confusion in the rules and regulations surrounding the process.

The economic nationalism and calls for protectionism seem ironic given the fact that Fonterra itself is a large multinational, which in addition to having farms in China, has since 2002 been in partnership with global food giant Nestle in the Dairy Partners Americas.

Southern Pastures, registered in Auckland, is seeking $500 million from local and offshore investors to initially buy outright, or controlling shares in, farming concerns throughout the southern hemisphere, but with a bias towards New Zealand.