China's Land Grab or Long Game? Inside Beijing's Infrastructure and Farmland Push Across Africa

The Scale: Bigger and Faster Than Most Realize

China's Belt and Road financing into Africa didn't slow down in 2026 — it exploded. Chinese investment in Africa under the Belt and Road Initiative surged 254% to $33.5 billion in the first half of 2026, with Africa attracting 67.24% of China's global BRI investment and nearly $47 billion in total engagements including construction contracts, led by Ethiopia and Egypt. Zoom out further and the historical footprint is staggering: BRI investment in Africa has helped build over 12,000 kilometers of road and railway track, around 20 ports, and more than 80 power facilities, with Chinese companies signing contracts worth more than $700 billion between 2013 and 2023 alone.

Ports are the clearest signal of intent. Beijing has established a presence in over 40 African ports, with stakes in up to 78 facilities across 32 nations as of 2026, backed by more than $50 billion in investment since 2013 — a push that has helped drive Africa-China trade to $348 billion in 2025, a 17.7% increase year-on-year.

## Where China Is Investing: Case Studies

**Ports & Free Trade Zones — Djibouti.** The template case. The Djibouti International Free Trade Zone, Africa's largest at 48.2 km², operates under a 50-year China Merchants concession, anchoring China's only overseas military base and its Red Sea logistics hub in one location.

**Rail — Kenya's SGR and the Addis-Djibouti line.** Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway, built with financing from the Exim Bank of China, connects Nairobi with the port city of Mombasa, while in the Horn, the Addis Ababa–Djibouti railway is a flagship BRI project and the first electrified transnational railway in East Africa. In West Africa, China Development Bank released over $250 million for the Kano-Kaduna railway in Nigeria in early 2025, and Kenya revived its stalled railway extension in March 2026 under a new financing model — evidence these corridors evolve rather than disappear.

**Bridges — Mozambique.** China Road and Bridge Corporation built Africa's longest suspension bridge, connecting Maputo with its suburb of Katembe, replacing a route that previously required a 160-km detour on flood-prone unpaved roads.

**Deep-water ports — Nigeria and Guinea.** Lekki Deep Sea Port, financed by China Development Bank and built and operated by China Harbour Engineering Company, opened as Nigeria's first deep-sea port. In Guinea, the giant Simandou iron-ore project pairs a railway of more than 650 km with a deep-water port, with much of the project Chinese-owned or Chinese-linked.

**East African corridors — Tanzania.** Tanzania has worked with China to repair the railway linking the port of Dar es Salaam to Zambia's copper belt, and is building a corridor into the DRC, where China holds major mineral interests — a direct feed line for its farmland and mining plays further inland.

**Farmland — a smaller, messier story than the headlines suggest.** Despite alarmist reporting, the numbers are modest. By 2014, Chinese investors had acquired only about 240,000 hectares of African farmland — not the millions initially reported — and many ambitious plans fizzled on poor infrastructure or land-rights conflicts. Zambia is the exception: since 2010, at least thirteen tracts of medium- to large-scale farmland have been purchased by "footloose" Chinese investors already operating in trade, construction, or real estate, who saw land as a safe asset during political uncertainty — though nine of those farms remained fallow and undeveloped as of 2019. In Uganda, Chinese ventures account for less than 1% of large-scale land acquisitions, and outside two demonstration/private farms, there's no evidence of other Chinese agricultural investment. Even Mozambique's infamous "land grab" narrative unravelled under scrutiny: a proposed 50,000-hectare concession to Chinese investors in the Zambezi valley fell apart after they concluded weak infrastructure and water problems made the region too expensive.

## Why China Is Investing

Three motives dominate:

1. **Resource access and food security.** Infrastructure helps China secure access to raw materials while extending commercial and geopolitical influence, and separately, rapid urbanisation, industrial growth paving over fertile land, and climate-driven droughts and floods at home are pushing Beijing to lease or buy farmland and agribusiness assets abroad.

2. **Strategic maritime positioning.** Africa sits along critical maritime corridors connecting Asia, Europe, and the Americas, making port access both an economic and strategic priority for China, which is also a major financier and operator of the roads, rail, and warehousing linked to those ports.

3. **Market access and value-chain capture.** China offers duty-free access to virtually all African countries, and is now moving up the chain — Africa's first EV battery gigafactory, in Morocco, is scheduled for 2026 production with Chinese partnership, alongside emerging lithium processing in Zimbabwe and rare-earth refinement in Kenya.

## The Terms

Chinese financing is overwhelmingly debt, not aid, and concentrated in hard infrastructure. Chinese official financing across twenty low- and middle-income countries totaled about $320 billion between 2000 and 2022, with 94% provided as loans and only 6% as grants, and more than two-thirds directed to infrastructure. In Africa specifically, roughly 39 Chinese lenders provided over 1,240 loans totaling around $170 billion to 49 African governments and seven regional institutions between 2000 and 2022, with China Exim Bank the dominant lender by volume.

A distinctive structure is the **resource-backed loan (RBL)**. China Development Bank and China Exim Bank are the top RBL lenders by volume, together the source of roughly three-quarters of resource-backed loans to Africa. Under this model, Chinese Exim Bank's "Resource Guarantee Infrastructure Financing" targeted mineral- and hydrocarbon-rich states, leveraging resource extraction against loan defaults in countries like Zambia (copper), Tanzania (gold), and Sudan (oil and gas). Concessions also run long: the Djibouti free-trade-zone deal, noted above, is a 50-year arrangement — typical of the multi-decade horizons China negotiates for port and zone control.

## Pros and Cons

**The case for:**

- **Infrastructure Africa otherwise couldn't finance.** China has helped build or upgrade more than 10,000 km of railways, nearly 100,000 km of highways, roughly 1,000 bridges, almost 100 ports, and 66,000 km of power transmission lines across Africa.

- **Real economic uplift.** Better roads, railways, ports, power systems, and irrigation generate tangible economic benefits for both sides through lower transport frictions, reduced trade costs, and expanded market access.

- **Flexibility in distress.** Asset seizures on default are, contrary to popular narrative, very unlikely — China's typical response is debt relief through extending repayment terms or rescheduling, not confiscation. China Exim Bank has, for instance, agreed to suspend Kenya's debt repayments in past crunches.

**The case against:**

- **Debt concentration and fiscal strain.** Djibouti's total debt to China equates to around 43% of GDP, and Kenya owed China roughly $6.8 billion by mid-2022, with SGR loans forming a substantial share, prompting Kenyan officials to seek extended repayment terms as the debt "chokes" the economy. Zambia has already defaulted, with restructuring talks stalled by Chinese state banks' hesitancy.

- **Sovereignty and asset-control anxiety.** Analysts warn China could resort to unilateral appropriation of strategic assets — ports, railways, power networks — in response to defaults, even if realized cases remain rare; Djibouti specifically faces debt-servicing pressure that pulls funds away from poverty-reduction and social services.

- **Governance and local-partner exclusion on the ground.** Opacity and exclusion of local partners in project management has fueled misunderstanding and protest, as with one Chinese agribusiness operator in Mozambique — even where land was legally acquired through government channels.

- **Overhyped land-grab narratives crowd out real analysis.** Much of the "China is buying African farmland" story is empirically thin, as the Uganda and Mozambique cases above show — but the myth still shapes policy debate and popular sentiment, distracting from where Chinese capital is *actually* concentrated: ports, rail, and mining-linked corridors.

## What Government and Agribusiness Should Take From This

1. **Separate the infrastructure story from the farmland story — they are not the same risk profile.** Ports and rail carry real debt-sustainability and sovereignty exposure; farmland acquisition in most countries remains small, fragmented, and often unsuccessful due to land-rights friction and weak feasibility work. Governments negotiating with Chinese state banks should benchmark against RBL precedent (Zambia's copper, Sudan's oil) before agreeing to resource-backed structures — know exactly what collateral is on the table before signing.

2. **Insist on local off-take and value-add clauses, not just construction contracts.** The gigafactory and refining moves in Morocco, Zimbabwe, and Kenya show China is willing to co-locate processing when it serves supply-chain security — governments should negotiate for that explicitly rather than settling for raw extraction plus a road to the port.

3. **Corridor-linked agribusiness is the real opportunity.** The Tanzania-Zambia-DRC corridor and similar rail/port upgrades are lowering the cost of moving produce to export markets faster than farmland acquisition ever will. Agribusiness operators should be mapping which Chinese-financed corridors intersect their supply chains and positioning logistics partnerships accordingly.

4. **Debt transparency protects negotiating leverage.** Countries that published full loan terms early — rather than after distress hit — had more room to renegotiate on favorable terms. Any government or SPV structuring Chinese financing should build in independent debt-sustainability review before signing multi-decade concessions.

5. **Don't confuse scale with inevitability.** The Uganda and Zambezi cases prove Chinese capital walks away from bad due diligence. Well-governed land tenure, water rights clarity, and infrastructure readiness are still the deciding factors — which means African governments retain more negotiating power than the "debt trap" narrative implies.

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*Africa Brew Brief is Africa One Media's investigative editorial series on African agribusiness, trade, and investment.*