Chinese-owned Kimberly Agricultural Investment (KAI), which has planned to invest $700 million into Australia’s Northern Territory has been rapidly developing land near Kununurra for the purpose of producing interim crops of sorghum and chia in 2015, but is still waiting upon lands that are critical to its sugar industry development scheme. Pressure is building on the Northern Territory government to move ahead on environmental approvals and negotiations with the Indigenous Traditional Owners to stop the delays which KAI is seeing as increasingly risky from an investor’s point of view. The sugar industry, which KAI plans to re-establish, collapsed in the Ord in 2007 however, to be successful it must have a scale of 25,000 – 30,000 hectares to meet 3 million tons of sugar production per year. Currently, KAI has access to a total of 16,000 hectares. Sugar has been a proven successful crop in the region and Australia’s Ord is ideally placed to meet growing demand for sugar in southeast Asia, but KAI’s plans of building a sugar mill with the capacity of 3-4 million tons per year for export is becoming increasingly uncertain given the lack of land being granted which is needed for the plan’s necessary scale.
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