Showing posts with label Farm programs China. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Farm programs China. Show all posts

Friday, January 08, 2016

Chinese Agriculture Is a Mess

That's the message I get from this interesting blog post.  It seems they have excess corn inventories and screwed up prices and programs.  It's a compendium of reports from Chinese officials and media.  This is just a taste:
The Caixin journalist observes that reforms of agricultural subsidies and procurement policies have been brewing over the last two years. Chinese officials have laid out a principle of detaching subsidy support from prices, but they have no clear policy to replace market-distorting price supports. The Caixin journalist observes that the government has put its hope in target price subsidy policies they have been testing for cotton in Xinjiang and soybeans in northeastern provinces since 2014, but many industry experts are pessimistic that these policies can be expanded to other commodities due to the extremely high administrative costs and other problems.
 It sounds as if they're where we were in the 1980's. [I've added the blog to my RSS feed.]