Analysis Of The Main Characteristics And Influencing Factors Of China’s Agricultural Trade

Agriculture is the basic industry of a country it plays an important role in the economic development because of being related to national economy and people’s livelihood. China has been regarded as an agricultural country for a long time, but it isn’t an agricultural giant. China’s Agricultural trade begins to gradually an even has lost competitiveness in the international stage facing the more and more open trade market with the economic globalization. Agricultural trade deficit began to appear in2004, and it had been lasted for nine years from2004to2012. What was worse, it showed a trend of expansion. The trade deficit expanded from$4.94billion in2004to$48.94billion in2012, increasing nearly nine times, and the average annual rate reached33.3%. Agricultural trade has become an economic problem which should not be ignored.This article selects soybean which has high external dependence in the agricultural trade as the research object. China was a net exporter of soybean before1996, but the soybean import was rising year by year after1996. The imports reached58.38million tons in2012, however, the domestic production of soybean was only13million tons in the same year. In other words, the domestic demand of soybean needs to be satisfied with imports more than80%. This is a serious problem worthy of attention and research and it’s even related to food security and social stability.From the basic theory of international trade, this paper first introduces the results of related researches. Secondly it analyzes the main characteristics of agricultural trade from three aspects, such as general situation, commodity structure and market structure. Then it takes soybean as an example and analyzes the influence factors of soybean imports using supply and demand theory and the stepwise regression method. It also analyzes whether our soybean has comparative advantage with index analysis method. On the basis of above analysis, the paper explores the problems of agricultural trade and how it will affect our country. In order to deal with these problems, the paper comes up to some measures.