China's push to improve food security and safety has provided the impetus for a growing wave of overseas acquisitions, says Mac El-Omari, head of JP Morgan’s consumer investment banking unit in Asia-Pacific.
The need to ensure China's people have enough safe food to eat has surged up the policy agenda since China's government published a 1996 white paper entitled The Grain Issue in China.
While many of China's farms and food processing plants are state-of-the-art including Cargill’s chicken farms in Lai’an, Anhui province the food chain does not always knit together well across the country, allowing contaminated food to slip in.
Government measures...