China’s Growth and the Agricultural Exports of Sub-Saharan Southern Africa

Abstract

The implications of China’s growth for the development prospects of sub-Saharan Africa have been the subject of recent attention. Interest in this topic is motivated by the increasing presence of China in the region, which in turn is reflected in the growing bilateral trade links. Against this background, this paper explores whether China’s growth has stimulated agricultural exports in selected countries of Southern Africa, namely, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, the Southern African Custom Unions and Zambia. We find little complementarity between China’s agricultural import demand and the Southern African (SA) countries’ agricultural export supply. We also explore the possibility of China affecting SA agricultural exports through higher world agricultural prices associated with China’s growing demand for food. We find that, although China has moderately increased agricultural prices (in an aggregated sense), SA exports do not seem to benefit from these price increases.