| For countries that lack of agricultural resource endowments, the domestic will put forward higher requirements to total demand for agricultural products and the demand structure with the increase in national income and upgrading of consumption structure. It will be necessary to import land-intensive agricultural products to supplement domestic supply shortage. However, during the opening of agricultural products imports market, different levels of imports scale and imports pace may impact domestic agricultural production and farmers’ income as well as affect the sustainable production capacity of domestic agricultural products. This paper takes soybean imports as example, studying the impact of soybean imports on domestic agricultural production, food security, farmers’ income and farmers’ behavior of planting structure adjustment and the resulting impact of imported soybean trade centralization on domestic soybean farming, to systematically summarize the experiences and lessons learnt from China’s soybean imports in order to provide references for China to open other agricultural product markets in the future.On the wording arrangements, the paper firstly examines the dynamic process of global and Chinese soybeans’ production and supply and demand, the status of and the reasons for differences in the cost and benefit between Chinese and foreign soybeans’ production as well as an overview of Chinese soybeans’import sources and the trend of Chinese soybean’ supply and demand in future period.The second and third part of the paper constructs a partial equilibrium model based on China’s agricultural supply and demand, to simulated analyze and compare the effect of soybean imports in shortage type and price difference type respectively on planting structure adjustment, food security, agricultural products’ price and farming income nationally and regionally. Study finds that soybean imports plays an important role in improving national food security, but price spread type soybean imports will cause serious impact on domestic soybean planting. Shortage type soybean imports allow that domestic soybean area fall 45.5 percent compared to the baseline scenario, grain, oil, cotton, sugar, and vegetable planting acreage increase 4.7%,2.5%,4.7%,4.7% and 10.4%respectively, domestic food crops (wheat, corn and rice) production increase 19.853 million tons compared with the baseline scenario, and food self-sufficiency level increase 4.4%. With the increase in the size of soybean imports, domestic soybean production presents a situation of the northeastand the Huang-Huai partial atrophy in place of national decentralized production.Price spread type soybean imports program will make domestic soybean acreagefall 31.2% compared with the shortage type soybean imports, vegetable planting acreage increased by 9.9%, but the grain planting area increased by only less than 1%, and oilseeds, cotton and sugar planting area will fall. The northeast and east China’s soybean planting acreage will fall 37.4% and 26.4% respectively due to the effect of price spread soybean imports.Soybean imports will widen income gap of the growing industry between the inland areas and the eastern coastal regions. The shortage type soybean imports benefit agricultural producers in the eastern region by reducing soybean production and increasing fruit and vegetable production, while the western region mainly increases crops production after reducing the production of soybean and vegetable, but the crops’ relative benefit is less than fruit and vegetable’s, leading to its total farming income damaged. The price spread type soybean imports mainly make the north China and the northeast reduce the production of soybeans and vegetables and increase production of food crops, thereby resulting in a decline of its farming producer’s total revenue.The fourth part views from the effects of soybean’s relative price on the household structural adjustment behavior, and uses household panel data to make an empirical analysis on the planting structure adjustment behavior of the 1818 soybean growers in the six major soybean producing areas in this country from 2006 to 2010. The study finds that soybean import has a significant effect on farmers planting structure adjustment. Soybean’s relative pricehas a significant positive impact on the soybean planting proportion, but there are significant differences among impacts on farmers in different provinces. Heilongjiang is in the highest latitude and has the strongest constraint by natural conditions, so the relative price has a significantly smaller effect on Heilongjiang famers’ structural adjustment behavior than the other soybean producing areas famers’. The proportion of soybean revenues in the total household incomeof soybean growers in Heilongjiang is much higher than in other regions, thus soybeanimports has the largest effect on Heilongjiang farmers’ income.Finally, the paper analyzes the effect of China’s imported soybean trade centralization on domestic soybean production from the perspective of industry chain. The results show that due to the multinational grain merchants’ strong position in Chinese imported soybean’s origin of resources, trade channels, global soybean pricing power, Chinese soybean crushing and soybean’s retail market, China’s soybean imports is largely subject to foreign multinationals companies, thus China is easily to become the major sales area of international soybean. And in this case, China’s soybean imports will soon shift from a shortage type to price spread type, Chinese domestic soybean will lose crushing market, and the domestic soybean production is shrinking and thus endanger the national edible soybean security in short time.According to the above findings, the paper finally put forward relevant policy advices about the domestic soybean planting remedies, the lessons that should be learned from opening other agricultural production imports market, strengthening international agricultural supply capacityas well as agriculture support policy.
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