A few weeks before the upcoming presidential elections in Kazakhstan, President Nazarbayev’s former son-in-law, former ambassador to Austria Rakhat Aliyev, accused the Kazakh leader of having signed a secret agreement with China about the handover of 1 million hectares of arable land to Chinese farmers for 99 years of lease on his recent trip to Beijing. This unverified piece of information published in Aliyev’s personal blog, which has recently become an outlet for critical statements about Nazarbayev’s handling of Kazakh politics, sparked serious controversy and pushed some opposition leaders to demand explanations from the president or his administration.
In order to defuse the brewing scandal, the Kazakh President’s counselor for political matters Ermukhamet Ertysbayev said to the press that Aliyev was merely trying to smear the current regime and was probably nurturing unjustified hopes of someday being acquitted of all the charges pressed against him in a 2007 trial in absentia. In that episode, the President stripped his son-in-law of all his positions, both those of responsibility and honorary, and the state prosecution initiated an investigation into Aliyev’s supposedly fraudulent attempt to take over the headquarters of one of Kazakhstan’s biggest banks – Nurbank. Though being permanently exiled in Vienna and deprived of all his Kazakhstan-based businesses which he shared with his wife and the president’s eldest daughter Dariga, Aliyev decided to stay involved in politics and launched a series of public campaigns against the Kazakh leader.
The “land lease scandal” could have been ironed out, had the Russian press not published a few ambiguous statements on behalf of a representative of the Chinese Ministry of commerce and, simultaneously, the president of a consulting company. In a commentary to a Russian news agency, CEO of Huahe International Liu Chuaniu said that Chinese businessmen were eager to entertain closer ties with Kazakh farmers from Almaty Oblast, where weather conditions and soil properties are propitious to intensive agriculture. In his view, land could be allotted either from the government-owned land funds, or directly from the private property of individual farmers who would like to benefit from large-scale production of crops needed on the Chinese market.
After the publication of Liu Chuaniu’s interview, the expert community in Kazakhstan remains highly divided over what interpretation of the “land lease story” to adopt to avoid confusion, especially on the eve of a presidential contest. Some of them, such as the lead analyst of the Quorum Internet portal Adil Kaukenov, believe that Chinese officials have always been very prudent in their talks with neighboring Kazakhstan and are more interested in fostering mutual trust than in alienating those in their immediate vicinity. He admits that wayward use of water from trans-boundary rivers and non-acceptance of Uyghur separatists from the Xinjiang region are doomed to remain hallmarks of Chinese policy, but the land issue, so sensitive to the majority of Central Asians, is too disturbing to be seriously pondered.
This opinion is shared by Konstantin Syroezhkin, a senior researcher at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies in Almaty. As a major specialist in Chinese affairs, Syroezhkin rules out any possibility of a 99-year-long lease of Kazakh land by companies from the Middle Kingdom. First, he says that the Constitution and the Land Code of Kazakhstan explicitly limit the term of land lease to 49 years for Kazakh nationals and to 10 years for foreign nationals and ban any purchase of land by non-Kazakhstanis. Secondly, Kazakhstan has no more arable land to exploit, especially in Almaty Oblast, as all unused territories are unfit for agriculture because of their poor quality.
The “land lease scandal” first broke out in December 2009, when President Nazarbayev touched upon a probable deal with Chinese companies about the joint exploitation of fertile lands for massive agricultural production. Vice-minister of agriculture Arman Yevniev then said that China’s demand of soy beans will increase to 50 million tons by 2015, so that Kazakhstan could aim to produce at least 1 million tons using half a million hectares of land. The President’s words, Yevniev explained, only stated an untapped cooperation potential with the setup of joint ventures and jointly implemented investment projects. However, in January 2010, the Minister of agriculture Akylbek Kurishbayev publicly promised that China would not get an inch of Kazakh land, whether through ownership or long-term lease. Thus, the government tried to downplay the seriousness of any plans that had already surfaced about the establishment of agricultural cooperation with China on the territory of Kazakhstan.
Earlier this month Alexander Sobyanin, a leading expert of the Association for trans-border cooperation based in Moscow, speculated in his blog that the creation of the Central Asian Agricultural Resources Corporation, announced last year, was intended to promote the idea of boosted cooperation with Kazakhstan in the field of agriculture.