Empirical Research On China's Cereal Import & Export Control Mechanism (2000-2009)

Cereals make a big difference in people's daily life, especially in China for both the public and the state. With government's attention on the three rural issue and NO.1 Document continuously releasing, the state's macro-control over grain markets has based on the principle of self-sufficiency in the domestic market, and the appropriate use of surplus or deficiency of international market. This paper observed food import & export control mechanism that bridging the two markets. Since the beginning of tenth "five-year plan" for national development, the research analyzed this decade on the basis of import and export data to explore the regulatory mechanism of China's cereal import & export including its meaning, institution, preconditions, influencing factors, and performance.Research about domestic food imbalances falls short as a starting point; through after analysis on a variety of different structure of production and demand it explains that the motivation of regulation is to ease the contradiction between production and domestic consumption. In addition, it sheds light that long-term goal of this mechanism is higher cereal self-sufficiency. This paper has selected annual growth rate of net imports, intensity of control, market concentration, trade efficiency and social welfare as key indicators to calculate the performance of regulation from the year of 2000 to 2009. Therefore, statistics showed that there was a certain degree of decline in operation evaluation because of price reverse control throughout the ten years, resulting in welfare losses before and after 2003. Moreover, the control on quantity resulting from imbalances between domestic production and consumption changed its function reversely or not. While all the time, its intensity of control has reduced. The control mechanism is divided into several stages, during which mechanism runs effectively for safety of regional cereal market in 2007. It concludes that China's cereal imports & exports must pursue moderate government control and regulation as a useful complement to market-oriented initiatives, which puts forward new demands on transparence and establishing database of information on domestic and international food market.