1st May 2004
Green Box Support Measures Under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and Chinese Agricultural Sustainable Development
China’s entry into the WTO will not only bring about more development opportunities with the opening of domestic and international markets and resources, but will also expose the country to greater global competition. More significantly, it will accelerate the formulation of laws, regulations and a policy framework that accord with the principles and rules of market economy and internationally accepted business practices. Agriculture formed a key area in China’s accession talks, and the issues of domestic support policy, followed closely at home and abroad, featured prominently during China’s agricultural negotiations. The impact of China’s WTO accession essentially lies in China’s domestic agricultural policies that must be bound by multilateral trade agreements and that it must fulfill all its commitments made during the accession talks. In other words, the impact is not just confined to the trade of agricultural products and the contribution of this trade to foreign exchange revenue, but to a greater extent it will result in the readjustments of the country’s agricultural development policies. These readjustments will further commercialize Chinese agriculture, optimize the agricultural structure and raise the efficiency of the sector. In view of the peculiar national conditions, however, these readjustments, when inappropriately made, may also produce some negative effects, leading to the contraction and recession of its agriculture or even shaking the status of the sector as the foundation for China’s national economic development.
The paper studies the issues of whether/how the Green Box policies/measures best suit the needs of structural adjustments in the post-WTO era, enabling China to effectively cope with the challenges arising from the transformation of economic systems/structures and the market opening, as faced by its agricultural sector. These issues are also coupled with the goals of achieving sustainable development in the sector. Furthermore, the paper attempts to provide some thoughts and recommendations for further reform of the multilateral rules on the Green Box from the perspective of China.