Research On The Agricultural Products Export In Shandong Province Under Green Trade Barriers

In the process of economic integration and trade liberalization, green trade barriers characterized by measures of protecting environment, human and animals' health has become one of the main forms of trade protection with the gradually decreasing role of tariff barriers. Specific legal rules of the green trade barriers on agricultural products include relevant provisions under the GATT/WTO framework, multilateral environmental agreement and national laws of China's environment in legal system.With green trade barriers' comprehensive, imbalanced, and discriminatory features, it safeguards the importing nation's economic benefits, ecological environment, and resources while threatens the exporting nation's benefits at the same time to some extent. Green trade barriers becomes more and more complex, which is implemented lawfully and rationally and thus made developing countries encounter new challenges and difficulties when they develop their foreign trade.As the world's largest developing country, agriculture industry is the traditional industry in China and agricultural products have been the traditional ones for trade. And green trade barriers will have a far-reaching influence on China's agricultural products export. Since China's accession to the WTO in 2001, China's agricultural products export enterprises have been restricted not only by tariffs, quotas and other restrictions, but also suffer from the so-called "green requirements", which led to difficulty in access to the world market.Under the WTO framework, more and more countries have adopted subtler, less transparent measures on their agricultural production and trade protection under green trade barriers, which makes it harder to monitor and predict. So China's agricultural trade and overall economic development will face new challenges, thus how to cope with green trade barriers has become key issues for us. Shandong Province is a major agricultural production base and a big agricultural province in China and its export on agricultural products plays a great role in the whole export market as well as in optimizing agriculture structure and enhancing the level of related domestic industries.In recent years, there has been a rapid development of foreign trade of agricultural products in Shandong Province with the total export value of S2.74 billion in the year 2000 rising to $12.71 billion in 2010. During the consecutive eight years from 2000 to 2008, agricultural products export in Shandong Province sustained rapid growth. Meanwhile, Shandong's agricultural products are fairly competitive not only in the domestic market, but also worldwide. Since China's accession to the WTO, Shandong has taken actions on both the international and home fronts to secure an even stronger market foothold. Recognized nationwide as China's Agricultural Champion, Shandong Province on China's east coastal area has taken the leading position in agriculture export in China for many years. Now it is regulating its agricultural industry to help the province to adapt to the fierce competition which can be expected in the global market in the future. For those industries related to vegetables, fruits, aquatic products and livestock products, more measures are being taken in Shandong to enhance its competitiveness. Quantity was the key issue for Shandong Province in the domestic market as for the agricultural products in the past. But in today's international market, quality control becomes a decisive factor for a win-win situation. Therefore, Shandong is working hard to develop a high-quality agriculture industry.But at the same time, Shandong Province has encountered a lot of setbacks under green trade barriers, which are mainly from Japan, Europe, the United States and other developed countries or regions. They set a variety of harsh rules and regulations with advanced science and technology due to the strong economic power under green trade barriers, which impeded the development of agricultural export in Shandong Province. This paper analyzes the constraint factors for export of agriculture products in Shandong Province based on the theory of green trade barriers as well as countermeasures for its future development. The introduction part demonstrates research background, significance of the paper and literature review.Through reviewing the existing international and domestic research, in the second chapter, it defines the notion of green trade barriers. The priority-development-environment theory, sustainable development theory laid a solid foundation for the emergence and development of green trade barriers. Then it gives a systematic exposition of the causes of it, followed by types of green trade barriers and its fundamental characteristics.The third chapter describes the status quo of agricultural trade of Shandong Province including situation of agricultural trade as well as analysis of agricultural trade development nationwide and comparison among other provinces in agricultural export through which we can see Shandong plays an important role in agricultural export.The fourth chapter is the research on main countries Shandong agricultural products export to under green trade barriers. In the first part, it presents the general situation of Shandong Province's agricultural products export to main countries and regions. Japan, U.S. and the EU are the major trading partners of Shandong Province. It is no doubt that green trade barriers enhances awareness of environment protection, human being's health, and animals and plants safety. Nonetheless, green trade barriers will also impose negative influence on trade. Many of the developed countries, with their solid financial strength and technological advancement, are moving ahead with respect to the environment standards and technical guidance. They have prepared a series of technical standards which can affect the developing countries seriously. Obviously, the environment standards and technical standards set by the developed countries are much higher than other countries, which is harder for the exporting countries to meet. Furthermore, the higher standards can result in extra costs, which make it even difficult for exporters to do business in the world. Japan has taken restrictive measures mainly on China's products such as vegetables, shellfish and other products. On May 29 th,2006, "Positive List System" was formally put into effect in Japan. Under this system, maximum residue limits were established for all agricultural chemicals residues, covering 302 kinds of food,799 kinds of agricultural chemicals, and 54,782 limited standards, which comprehensively increased the technological threshold of agricultural products import for entering the market. "Positive List System", with checks starting overseas is a new comprehensive safety and sanitation monitoring program. The EU has come up with more requirements for the food exporters, which means export of agricultural products to the EU, should not only reach the EU food safety standards, but also attach importance to food safety management, and U.S. has set higher requirements in food safety and hygiene of imported products. In the following parts, characteristics of technical regulations and standards were analyzed under green trade barriers of Japan, the EU and U.S. Then analysis of negative influence on relevant agricultural products exported to these countries or regions was shown in this chapter based on extensive data and information and corresponding countermeasures were made to deal with the negative effect of green trade barriers.The last one is also one of the most important chapters, based on the above studies, the main suggestions are provided from the level of government, enterprises and non-governmental organizations:firstly, at the national level, the government as a policy maker should promote the concept of green-consumption, improve standards and certification systems, actively develop ecological agricultural and production bases to improve overall quality level of agricultural products, and establish an early warning system to prevent from foreign green trade barriers. Generally, government is responsible for establishing the system of perfecting agricultural standard, improving the quality level of agricultural products study and following the trail of the international standard constantly. By adopting the international standard and advanced standard of foreign countries actively and accelerating upgrade of the agricultural quality, government is supposed to take responsibility to strengthen the export competitiveness of agricultural products. Furthermore, being the regulator of import and export, government should take steps to perfect the supervision and inspection. In order to achieve the goal of introducing and improving monitoring technology as well as enhancing our domestic products' quality at the same level with the developed countries, we should reach the same standard with the country with advanced technology so that the barriers in import and export will be less. In addition, strengthening the quality inspection of agricultural products and system construction, examining main agricultural products with the advanced technology and accelerating the process of connections with international standards should also be our priority. We are confident that our government will assist thousands of business breaking through the "green trade barriers" and exploiting more opportunities in the global market. Secondly, enterprises should raise the green-awareness, and actively improve technology for better quality on their own initiative to avoid trade protectionism. They should also actively adopt green marketing, apply for relevant international certification and foster diversification of export market so as to expand the target market and improve the international competitiveness of agricultural products. Green marketing strategy means that enterprises should develop green commodities, expand green market, nurture green consumers, establish green supply chains and enable their green commodities to enter the world market successfully under instruction of above mentioned conception. Enterprises should execute for its sustainable development conception and take environment protection as their top responsibility. Enterprises should take social interests, environment protection and customers' satisfaction into consideration during the consistent operation of current and future marketing strategy. First of all, enterprises should establish and improve the industry technology system of modern agriculture. Enterprises should take full advantage of our agriculture's distinctive features and our specific national conditions, accelerate the innovation of system and mechanism, and promote agricultural science and technology innovation, popularization and talent training, exploring a pragmatic and efficient model of agricultural science and technology. Secondly, enterprises should invest more to innovation including introduction of technology innovation and increase technological input during the process of production. Enterprises should also focus on the employment technological training, pay more attention to the products quality, and expand the inspection for products technological contents to avoid the negative effect of the green trade barriers. Thirdly, non-governmental organizations such as industry associations should enhance self-construction, establish early warning mechanisms and improve the technical standards. A main trend of development at present is to protect the environment. In general, compared with government and enterprises, NGO plays a complementary role in dealing with green trade barriers. NGO is a vital part in the economy circle, especially in the 21st century when there are some problems that cannot be resolved by the government alone. At president, regarded as corporation partners in the process of social economic development by developed countries' government, international communities as well as most of developing countries government', NGO has achieved irreplaceable accomplishments in coping with complicated affairs involving establishing specific rules and regulations and taking the initiative of various sectors of the industry. Through profound organization innovation and institution revolution worldwide, NGO has gained strong power in dealing with green trade barriers.The main conclusion of this paper is as follows:Green trade barriers can be seen as a "double-edged sword". On the one hand, public health and life can be protected by means of setting safety standards to secure consumers' health, which will exert positive impact on the national economy and social-economic development. On the other hand, it may also be employed as one kind of trade protectionism, resulting in increasing trading costs and trade disputes, which will bring negative impact to trade.The main reason why foreign countries adopted green trade barriers against Shandong Province mainly lies in the excessive pesticide residues existed in the products export. Many countries have made their own environmental standards and testing methods, among which the limitation of harmful residues of agricultural products should be paid much attention. The standard of testing pesticide residues in agricultural products becomes even tighter and vegetables, aquatic products and other processed food also encountered problems with microbiological testing requirements. Different countermeasures should be adopted as measures taken under green trade barriers vary according to different countries.