A billionaire Chinese businessman has been snapping up French farmland
In the peaceful French village of Thiel-sur-Acolin, retired farmer Marc Bernardet is ambivalent about having a Chinese billionaire for a neighbour.
Over the past four years Hu Keqin has quietly snapped up 3,000 hectares of wheat fields in the central Indre and Allier regions, including next door to Bernardet.
His purchases are part of a Chinese buying-spree in recent years stretching from the US to Australia. And in France, struggling farmers fear a landgrab.
"It's a piece of French heritage that is being taken, but that's globalisation and that's the trend at the moment," Bernardet told AFP.
"If it wasn't the Chinese, it would be someone else."
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