Drawing on the wider political economy of global commodities markets, this paper analyses the dynamics of agrarian change related to the rise of emerging economies. Departing from an overview of China's trade relations with Brazil, it discusses the consequences of these asymmetric relations for the countries' international strategies and their broad impacts in developing countries. To do so, the paper is structured according to two objectives. The first focuses on the political economic trends of the emerging countries' role in the agricultural sector, particularly through the shift in soy trade flows towards Brazil and China and their engagement in building a global biofuel market. The second objective connects the shifts in patterns of trade to an increasing wave of investments in southern Africa's farmland and it analyses the barriers and the effects of this movement in Mozambique.