Citic Construction managing director in Angola Fan Juntao and Angola Agriculture Minister Isaac dos Anjos. (Photo: Angola Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry)Bloomberg | 8 October 2025 

By Candido Mendes and Monique Vanek

In September, Beijing approved imports of blueberries from Zimbabwe for the first time. It had given the green light in June to Gambian groundnuts and cashews. Ethiopian soybean meal, a protein-rich byproduct of crushed beans mainly used to feed poultry and pigs, just got its first go-ahead to enter the Chinese market too.

To Africa’s 54 countries and the international investors jostling to fund their next wave of agricultural projects, these seemingly minor bureaucratic decisions sent a loud message: US President Donald Trump’s trade war is creating big opportunities for African economies, especially when it comes to food.

Long viewed through the lens of subsistence farming and postcolonial land rights, African agriculture is rapidly becoming a proving ground for global investment. For China and other nations whose US trade has been disrupted, Africa offers a chance to diversify away from politically risky agricultural imports. President Xi Jinping announced in June that China would remove tariffs on imports from all African countries with which it has diplomatic ties. “The Chinese government’s basic strategy is very clear,” says Christopher Beddor, deputy China research director at Gavekal Dragonomics, a financial research firm. The country, which has also been investing heavily in South American markets, wants to put more distance between its economy and Trump, and “that means it is willing to strike agricultural deals just about everywhere in the developing world, including in Africa.”

Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf states have also been investing heavily in farming and related infrastructure on the continent. Those deals provide a vital hedge against the climate volatility and resource scarcity threatening the Middle East’s own food production.

World powers investing across Africa—home to almost 1.6 billion people and roughly 60% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land—haven’t always left the region better off. In the past two decades, governments in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Zambia and other countries that were eager to modernize their agriculture industries welcomed Chinese investors. But many regions lacked the roads, power plants and resettlement plans—or even the stable political environment—needed to make large-scale commercial farming viable. Projects that promised capital, technology and jobs often disempowered rural communities and stirred controversy. “For each of the handful of investments that finally succeeded, many more failed because of poor infrastructure, coups, contentious elections, even civil wars,” American political scientist Deborah Bräutigam wrote in her 2015 book, Will Africa Feed China?

These newer deals are different, government officials say. For one, unlike earlier tie-ups that mostly centered on how to get Africa’s raw materials cheaply to overseas markets, many of the 2025 agreements blend commercial interests with social development projects such as building infrastructure, creating permanent jobs and sharing technological know-how with African business leaders. Many of the modern deals also require some of the new output to stay local for domestic use.

Every deal is different, but the overarching goal is the same: to improve productivity for the benefit of the host country as well as its overseas backers. Qatar, for instance, plans to invest $1.5 billion in Ghana’s agriculture sector by the end of the year to fund irrigation and increase the output of exportable food—an initiative that’s expected to generate more than 2,500 jobs there. Additionally, Qatar’s Al Jedad Holding has linked up with Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture to build a $5 billion fertilizer production facility at the Petroleum Hub in Atuabo, in Ghana’s Western region. The aim is to create a domestic source of urea and ammonia, which would reduce Ghana’s reliance on pricey farm-chemical imports and strengthen its food security.

In many of these next-generation arrangements, the land that will be cultivated will remain state-owned. That’s the plan in Angola, which is shaping up as the continent’s most ambitious test case. Over a week in late July, the southwestern African nation signed $350 million worth of agricultural deals with Chinese companies. A $250 million investment by Beijing’s Citic Construction Co. will develop 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres) of soy and corn, and another deal grants state-owned hydropower builder Sinohydro Group a 25-year tax-free concession to cultivate 30,000 hectares of grain. This summer, Angola also inked agreements with Brazil and the UAE, opening up almost 2 million hectares of farmland to foreign investors. Angola is courting investment from Japan too.

Unlike past deals, these aren’t pilot projects or one-off investments. Sixty percent of output from these farms is earmarked for overseas markets; the rest stays in Angola, says Agriculture Minister Isaac dos Anjos. Foreign companies will operate alongside farmers in subdivided plots of 1,000 to 2,000 hectares. Instead of displacing communities, the government says it’s integrating them—offering co-production agreements and allowing rejected export crops to remain in the country.

By seizing an opportunity created in part by the trade standoff between China and the US, Angola expects to be able to diversify its economy away from oil, which today accounts for more than half of government revenue. “You must admit this is an opportunity for Angola, and Angola shouldn’t be afraid to take it,” dos Anjos says. The government wants to attract as much as $2 billion in agriculture investment annually over the next five years and ultimately more than double the sector’s contribution to gross domestic product to 23%. “We’ve always had potential,” he says. “Now we need to turn that into reality.”

The new era of dealmaking is not without risks. For one, infrastructure remains a major challenge. “Most investors ask for land near ports, with rail links, transport infrastructure, power lines,” dos Anjos says. “It’s the one condition we cannot satisfy.” To help address that, Angola is fast-tracking development of the Lobito Corridor, a rail and port route linking the country’s agricultural heartland to Atlantic shipping routes. Similar spending is taking place in Kenya, Morocco, Senegal and other countries.

Whether Angola becomes the blueprint for Africa’s agricultural future or another cautionary tale won’t be clear for several farming seasons. The political scientist Bräutigam, who’s also director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, remains skeptical. “Chinese companies and African governments both like to announce really big deals, which gets much more attention,” she says. The actual investment total, she says, may never reach the headline number.

Meanwhile, trading activity between the world’s second-largest continent and its overseas investors continues to ramp up. In the weeks since regulators in a quiet corner of China’s sprawling trade bureaucracy approved the Ethiopian soymeal exports, the inaugural shipment has hit the seas. It won’t be passing any ships carrying US soybean meal to Chinese buyers—Beijing, which began diversifying away from American agriculture during Trump’s first trade war, hasn’t bought any US soymeal since 2023. —With Fasika Tadesse