It might sound perverse for a Chinese company to go half-way round the globe to grow soya and other crops on unproductive land in a dry corner of Argentina.

Yet that is what Beidahuang Group, a state-owned farm company based in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang, is doing in the Patagonian province of Río Negro.

If it works, the Inter-American Development Bank-backed farming project will spread irrigation technology and expand the frontiers of Argentina’s chief cash crop out of the traditional soya belt in exchange for helping China lock in food supplies for its fast-growing population. Beidahuang, which spawns nine separate companies plus agricultural investigation centres, is China’s top food group. In 2010, it produced some 17.5bn kilos of grains including 15bn kilos of cereals – sufficient, the company says, to feed 75m people for a year.