Comparative Advantage Analysis Of Main Crops In Shanghai

The agriculture in Shanghai is playing a more and more important role in providing fresh agricultural products to the city. In the meanwhile, Shanghai is experiencing high speed development, and farmland is a scarce resource. Therefore it is very important to investigate the current status of the agriculture in Shanghai, so that we can plan the agricultural structure more scientifically in order to improve economical value of the farming sector in Shanghai.Based on the traditional comparative advantage theory which only considers productivity and planting scale of the crops, we extended the theory to include three more indices, namely, index of regional labor advantage, index of mechanization in farming, and index of market and infrastructure, in an attempt to reflect the comparative advantage of the crops more comprehensively and objectively. Using the data in “Yearly Statistics of Shanghai Agriculture” of the past 6 years, and “The communique of the second national census of agriculture”, we calculated the comparative advantage values of 4 food crops and 5 cash crops in Shanghai using both the traditional comparative advantage theory and our extended comparative advantage theory.The results show that among the food crops, rice has scale advantage, soybean has productivity advantage, and rice also has the overall advantage. Among the cash crops, rapeseed, watermelon and strawberry have scale advantage, whilst rapeseed and watermelon have productivity advantage; rapeseed, watermelon and strawberry also have overall advantage, and rapeseed shows obvious advantage in several aspects.Results of the extended theory show that wheat(food crop) and vegetables(cash crop) also have advantages. Although rice has significant scale and overall advantages, its productivity is less competitive. In order to boost the advantage of rice crop, we can invest more in farming technology to raise the productivity of the rice crop. Regarding the cash crops, rapeseed and watermelon have significant scale, productivity and overall advantages, therefore we should promote the growing of these two crops. Strawberry has scale and overall advantages, but less competitive productivity, therefore we can improve the growing technology to raise the overall advantage of strawberry.Since farmland is a scarce resource in Shanghai, we can expand the growing of cash crops which produces more economic value, to improve the overall economic value of the farming sector. However, we should keep in mind that adjustment and optimization of the agricultural structure should consider the comprehensive effects of economic, social and ecological factors, instead of economic value as the only evaluation criteria.