| Corn, as one of world’s staple food, its cultivated area ranks third in the world, only second to wheat and rice, and it is also the most popularly distributed crop in the world. At present, the world total output of corn has ranked first among all grain crop, its trade volume is only second to wheat. Corn, being the third of our country’s grain crop, boasts glorious production history and plays very important role in grain crop production. Its total output has increased from 10% to about 30% at present, and its annual output ranks second in the world, taking over 20% of the world’s total, only second to USA. With the social progress and technological advancement, corn is not only used for food consumption, it has been applied in animal husbandry and food processing, displaying its multifunction as“food, cash crop and forage”. However, after joining WTO, according to agricultural treaty set by“Uruguay Round", our country must expand domestic agricultural product market to open to the outside world, reduce tustoms duty rate, cancel the nontariff barrier and grain export subsidy gradually. The present problems that we have face are how can our country’s corn survive under fierce international competition, how can China’s corn occupy domestic and international market so as to ensure corn growers’ economical benefits and increase farmers’ income.The study, based on relevant theories on international competitiveness, employs both quantitative and quantitative methods and conducts systematical analysis on corn production, consumption and international trade in the world and in China. The paper analyses the main factors that affect corn international competitiveness, explores index system that affects corn international competitiveness, and conducts empirical and comparative analysis on china’s present corn competitiveness, aiming to discover China’s advantages and disadvantages in corn international competitiveness.The study comes to the following conclusions: first, based on the analysis of world and China’s corn consumption and price and non-price factors, the research conducts systematic study on factors affecting our country’s corn international competitiveness. It is concluded, apart from price factor, product quality and product brand, environmental factor, to a certain degree, plays a decisive role in corn competitiveness. Second, through utilization opportunity cost theory, from three aspects of land opportunity cost, profit opportunity cost and technology advancement opportunity cost, the study predicts China’s reasonable corn price with an conclusion that, only when corn price is between 1.11-1.46 yuan/kilograms, can normal production and supply be guaranteed. Therefore, the government should take food safety and increasing farmer’s income into consideration when guiding corn price so that sufficient marked supply can be ensured, for foreign corn entering China’s market would pose threat to corn growers, thus affecting their economic benefits and income. Third, based on corn production cost data in 1990-2008, production element is divided into labor cost, land cost, material and service expense. The study, adopting link relative ratio, conducts analysis on the above three production elements’ corn production cost’s sensitivity, with the help of SPSS17.0 software, and concludes, labor cost, material and service expense, and land cost to the corn production cost sensitive coefficient is 1.9588, 1.3279 and 0.6526 respectively. The study finds the most obvious factor affecting corn total cost is labour cost and material and service expenses. Land cost exerts little impact on China’s total corn cost, for, the government has implemented series of preferential policies to reduce land cost, such as direct grants and exempting agricultural tax and so on.The paper suggests effective approaches to enhances our country’s corn international competitiveness: First, to stabilize cultivated area and expand corn growing area; Second, to set up scientific and reasonable guiding price; Third, to increase improved variety and cultivate new corn variety with fine quality and high output and raise commodity rate; Forth, to speed up technical popularization and enhance corn growers’ technical level; Fifth, to implement large scale management and reduce production cost and circulation cost; Sixth, to accelerate corn futures market development and enhance the stability of corn supply and demand; Seventh, to implement internationalization strategy and guarantee balanced corn supply and demand. |
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