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Agriculture faces serious challenges
World Trade Organization accession is a good servant but a bad master for China. Is
China's agricultural sector a threat to the nation's torrid economic growth?
That was the question posed by the late Gale Johnson, a prominent agricultural and
development economist at the University of Chicago, during the closing years of 1980s.
His conclusion was that the answer was "No", which he backed up by a thorough review
of China's rural development over the previous 15 years.
Twenty years later, despite the challenges arising from a closer connection with the world
trade system, his answer still seems valid.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of China's entry into the World Trade Organization
(WTO). During the past decade, the nation's agricultural sector has experienced stable
development and has achieved increased grain production for seven consecutive years.
Accession to the WTO has brought some opportunities, said Shenggen Fan,
director-general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. As
China became part of the integrated global trading system, it was able to employ its
connections with the international food market, so that "producers can thus specialize in
the production of goods that are most suited to the country's resource endowments", Fan
said.
"In China's case, the large rural labor force (relative to land area) gives the country a
comparative advantage in labor-intensive agricultural production, such as fruits,
vegetables, and aquatic products."
But accession to the WTO has also brought challenges. Since joining the organization,
China has reduced its import tariffs on agricultural products by 72 percent. The
country's current tariff is less than 25 percent of the average global level, according to
data from the Ministry of Agriculture.
As the market gradually opened up, China's trade volume in agricultural products
registered sharp growth. According to the ministry, the total trade volume for agricultural
products shot up more than threefold to $122 billion in 2010 from $28 billion in 2001.
Imports jumped to $72.6 billion in 2010 from $12 billion 10 years earlier, with a
year-on-year increase of 22.3 percent over that period. In the meantime, China's exports
of agricultural products jumped to $49 billion in 2010 from $16 billion in 2001, up 13.3
percent year-on-year on an annual basis.
Propelled by the booming trade volume, a trade deficit began to surface in the agricultural
sector, and has been expanding rapidly over recent years. In 2010, China's trade deficit in
the sector had increased to $23 billion from $4.6 billion in 2004.
Driven by growing demand, self-sufficiency rates for some products have also fallen
sharply. Currently, China can only produce less than 30 percent of its annual domestic
soybean consumption. Moreover, the country can only produce less than half of its annual
edible oil consumption and no more than 60 percent of cotton, according to data from the
Ministry of Agriculture. Many Chinese experts regard this as a result of the impact of the
international market.
Analysts believed that China should further develop its agricultural processing industry to
ensure food security and reinforce the nation's advantages in the international trading
system. "The processing industry could cushion the impact from the global food market
and secure China's food security," said Sun Licheng, a former president of North China's
Jilin Agricultural University.
"Compared with the producer, processing is the part with more added-value. We can gain
better control of food prices with a sophisticated processing sector, no matter who the
producer is," Sun said.
To further develop the industry, the government should encourage companies to prolong
the industrial chain and promote technological innovation, said Xu Xiaoqing, director of
the Department for Rural Economic Development at the Development Research Center
(DRC) of the State Council, a top think tank.
"Joining the WTO has formally opened up China's agricultural marketing. We can only
rely on technologies and product quality in market competition," Xu said.
Changchun Dacheng Industrial Group Company Ltd, based in the capital city of Jilin
province, is one of several companies to have undergone rapid expansion over recent
years. Originally a corn processor, the company is now China's largest producer of lysine,
an amino acid widely used as an additive in animal feed.
The company's success comes largely from its focus on technological Innovation, through
which it has transformed itself into a chemical giant with world-leading technology to turn
cornfield waste into glycols. This year, the United States-based Fast Company magazine
ranked Dacheng Group 46th out of the world's top 50 "most innovative" companies.
Except for the processing sector, the government should also foster some massive trade
companies in the agricultural sector, said Xu from the DRC.
"We need some massive food marketers that can compete in the international market to
speed up the development of China's agricultural sector. Even some State-owned
companies need more time and support for further expansion to become large-scale
traders," said Xu.
For more information, refer to Herostart Platform.