Agricultural And Agricultural Machinery Cooperation Under The GMS Regime

Since the late 1980s, with the continuous development of the regional and economic cooperation, the international community has seen many regional cooperation regimes, big or small, in one form or another. Greater Mekong Subregion Economic Cooperation (GMS) is the system to promote the development of Greater Mekong region as well as one of the many earliest and the most effective regime of cooperation on the issue of Greater Mekong region. With the support and guidance of the regime, the Greater Mekong region has been considerably developed, and has aroused attention from all over the world.This paper begins from the concept of region and regional cooperation, and then briefly introduces the scope of the participants, natural human condition and the main regional cooperation regimes in the Greater Mekong region. As a means of promoting cooperation, international regimes can facilitate the continuous deepening and development in the region. Based on international regimes functional theory, the paper aims to analyze the agriculture machinery cooperation of China and the countries in the Greater Mekong region. The function theory of the international regimes holds that regimes can reduce costs in the process of achieving agreement. And when a regime is set up, the cost of dealing with a marginal argument is less than one without a regime. Therefore, specific agreements are always embedded in a regime; in the same way regime can reduce the obstacles of cooperation by lowering the uncertainty and the lack of transparency of information. In the Greater Mekong region, through the national efforts among all the member countries, the Greater Mekong regional economic cooperation regime has been expanding. The Asian Development Bank in 1992 advocated that major efforts should be put on the transportation and the development of human resources and some other important cooperation areas in the early development of the Greater Mekong. After 15 years of development, the Greater Mekong economic cooperation has involved nine areas including energy and agriculture.As a loose regime, Greater Mekong regional economic cooperation didn't regard agriculture as an important area in the early days. But agriculture is an important industry in the Greater Mekong region, and Thailand, Vietnam are the world famous"breadbasket", what's more, there is a large agricultural population. All of the above mentioned aspects decide agriculture as a regional area of cooperation is very essential. In 2001, agriculture was incorporated into the regime as an important cooperation aspect which reduces the transaction costs among the member countries of the region. Meanwhile the cooperation in agricultural machinery trade is a sub-project of the important topics: countries of the region are weak in industrial base, so agricultural mechanization is the direction of agricultural development. So it is necessary to reduce the uncertainty of information in the agricultural regime trade in the Greater Mekong region on the basis of the economic cooperation in the region.Finally this paper concludes that according to the actual situation in the Greater Mekong regional agricultural machinery development, China's superior to other member countries in that aspect. Therefore, the specific situation in the region demands that China should increase intra-regional trade in agricultural machinery. And the paper also provides some strategies which can be useful in meeting China's challenges in the Greater Mekong region agriculture machinery.