Ashmore International takes yet another step forward to be the global leader with the acquisition of farmlands in Southeast Asia and subsequently China.
United Kingdom, London, December 23, 2016 (Newswire.com) - Southeast Asia has an ideal climate for agriculture cultivation. While Vietnam has traditionally led the way for agriculture production in ASEAN, other countries in the ten-nation bloc are steadily growing as agriculture exporting nations. In particular, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand are markets that are both under-saturated and open to foreign investment.
Ashmore International identified this opportunity and moved their investments into ASEAN. This year, Ashmore International has acquired farmlands in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, adding over 20,000 acres of farmland to its portfolio for approximately USD 65 million. Ashmore International also provides loans to farmers in Southeast Asia as a form of investment diversification. “Impact investment in Southeast Asia has tremendous potential. We look forward to continuing to forge relationships with farmers and fellow peers in the region as we work towards to be the global market leader,” said Adrian Wright, Chief Executive Officer at Ashmore International.
Moving forward after ASEAN, he mentioned that Ashmore International would be looking at investments into China. China has cleared the way for private investment in large-scale farming, announcing a change in land rights that heralds a new era for agriculture in the world’s most populous nation. The move into corporate farming is designed to solve two pressing problems of the Chinese countryside – a rapid increase in elderly farmers and poor yields from the country’s hundreds of millions of small plots.
China is hoping to entice foreign and private capital to invest in the tightly-controlled agricultural sector. “We will be looking at China after the Chinese authorities announced that they want to relocate 100 million farmers and the farmland they leave behind will be bundled into larger tracts that would be farmed by corporations using more modern methods. This is a great opportunity for a multinational corporation like Ashmore International to move in. We will be looking at cultivating to increase the supply of agriculture crops to feed the growing global population,” he said.
Source: Ashmore International
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