Food Security Based On China-Asean Regional Economic Cooperation

For a long time, China’s food policy has been "Self-sufficiency",which means high investment and high dissipation in food production, and more pressure for the limited water and arable land resources. To reduce the high policy cost and improve its efficiency, international trade is a valid solution to stabilize the domestic food supply. Since China formally entered the WTO in2001, its food import increases rapidly. However, risks of the deficient international food market were highlighted by the global food crisis in2007and2008. In this background, it is a new idea to secure regional food supply relying on the regional economic cooperation mechanism.This thesis mainly takes out empirical research from the following three aspects. Firstly, it studies the feasibility of the new solution by the China-world (China excluded) and China-ASEAN correlation based on the calculation of their rice production fluctuation and the correlation coefficient of the volatilities. Then, on basis of gravity model(GM), it empirically studies the effect of regional trade arrangements(RTA) on the bilateral trade flows of cereal, under the different modes of "no fixed effect","time fixed effect" and "time, importer and exporter fixed effect" Finally, the cereal trade potential is measured and compared with the fact under the mode with best performance where China imports from its main trade partners.The empirical results are as follows. Taking rice as an example, food supply from ASEAN can generally be guaranteed both in amount and at time points. Thus the feasibility of the regional cooperation solution is mostly ensured. Moreover, the GM regression shows that the regional trade arrangement China has attended, namely APEC and CAFTA, have significant facilitation to the bilateral trade flows. As for the trade potentials, China overtrades with Thailand and Vietnam while having insufficient trade with Indonesia and the Philippines, and appropriate with Singapore. Therefore, it suggests that China should further its FTA strategy and cooperation on food security with ASEAN. The proportion of cereal import from countries with various trade potential should also be properly adjusted.There are also two main innovation points in the thesis. For one hand, it analyses the feasibility of safeguarding food security through CAFTA regional cooperation by examinining the annual food supply tendency and food production fluctuation consistency between.two trade partners. For the other, under three different modes, a modified GM is used to deal with panel data in a large database with long and broad range. So it is more practical.and reasonable for further decision analysis.