Down on the farm
Russia's impoverished Far East has welcomed the influx of Chinese businesses seeking crops and produce as they bring in vital investment
Fourteen years ago, Chinese businessman Li Demin was asked to help bail out a struggling pig farm in the Russian trading city of Ussuriysk, near the Pacific coast.
"At the time I was trading and wasn't at all interested because I knew nothing about raising pigs. So I said I would only buy if they threw in 500 hectares," Li said.
In the end, the local government offered to lease Li more land than he asked for, and more was to come. Now spanning 40,000 hectares and expected to expand further, Li's farm is the biggest in Russia's Far East and one of the largest foreign-invested agricultural projects in the country. It raises 30,000 pigs a year and grows soya beans and corn that are sold locally or shipped to China.
It seems to be a natural fit. Russia's Far East Federal District, a region two-thirds the size of the United States, has a population of just 6.3 million and wide swathes of unfarmed fertile land.
China is next door, its 1.4 billion people have an insatiable appetite for crops and produce, and its companies have scoured the globe to lease farmland.