Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of China's recent rural-urban performance. This suggests that there is ample
scope for a more rapid rate of migration of labour out of the rural sector,
which would help reduce the rural-urban income gap.
China's agricultural trade after WTO accession
Chen (see Chapter 11) examnes how the pattern of Chna's agrcultural trade
has changed since the country's accession to the WTO. In that time, the
economy has grown very rapdly. The average annual growth rate of Chna's
real GDP was more than 9.8 per cent during 2002-05. China's foreign trade
has been expanding even more rapidly—at an annual growth rate of 28.6 per
cent, compared with 9.4 per cent during the 1990s. Undoubtedly, China's
economy has benefited from its more open international trade regime.
In real terms, China's agricultural exports and imports hardly changed
in the period 1992-2001; but since then both have increased rapidly,
although imports have grown much more rapidly than exports—so much
so that in 2004 and 2005 China experienced its first agricultural trade
deficits since at least the early 1990s. Chen shows that the changes in
Chna's trade snce 2001 have been strongly consstent wth the country's
comparative advantage, which is in labour-intensive activities. While
increasing very rapidly, agricultural exports have, however, become a
considerably smaller share of total trade. Moreover, within agricultural
trade, processed agricultural products are dominating exports and imports
are being dominated increasingly by cereals, vegetable oils and oil seeds,
and raw materals for textles. Processed agrcultural products are labour-
intensive activities, while cereals, vegetable oils and oil seeds, and raw
materals for use n textles are land-ntensve actvtes.
Implications of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreement
In parallel with WTO accession, China has also engaged actively in regional
and bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs). At present, China has bilateral
FTAs with Pakistan, Chile, Jordan, Thailand, the Association of South-East
Asian Nations (ASEAN) (currently the Early Harvest Program, EHP, is in
operation but the full FTA is not expected until 2010), Hong Kong and Macau
(as a Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, CEPA). China is currently
