Tudela, Cabrera, the mayor’s staffers George Camacho and Jose Tenorio traveled to Jinlin province in China last Nov. 8 to sign a sister city agreement with Siping.
They also went to the neighboring Baishan City during the weeklong trip arranged by Patrick Wang of the America-China Friendship Association.
The travel costs were paid by Jinlin’s provincial government and Shanghai Airlines.
Cabrera said the mayors and other local officials of two Chinese cities brought them to some areas where agro-industrial development is taking place.
The agro-industrial activities there, he said, are “awesome and too large for a small island.”
Cabrera said they toured a corn oil and corn starch manufacturing plant that sits in the middle of a 100,000-acre plantation.
They also went to a slaughterhouse where 700 pigs are slaughtered each day, and a vast cabbage plantation.
Since Jinlin province also has tropical climate, Cabrera said most agriculture products there are the same as the crops grown here.
Although the agro-industry in the two cities is far ahead of the CNMI in terms of technology and size of land resources, Cabrera believes there are some projects that can be developed here in a smaller scale.
He said he got many ideas about corn processing, piggery and vegetable farming that can be done here.
According to Cabrera, a bottled water manufacturer in Jinlin wants to export its products to Saipan.
Baishan, the CNMI delegation was told, produces the third top quality drinking water in the world, next to Germany and Switzerland.
