The Economic Analysis Of Edible Bean Industry In China

The edible beans industry is an important part in China agriculture. Although the edible beans industry is not large in China grain production, it has irreplaceable roles in solving the food security and ensuring the farmers’ income in poor and remote areas, improving the residents’ dietary structure, promoting sustainable agricultural development and protecting agricultural diversity, since the edible beans have strong production adaptability, unique nutritional value, good health benefits, effective nitrogen-fixing capabilities. However, there are still many problems during the edible beans development, such as scattered planting and low degree of organization and specialization, low yields and inter-annually fluctuations of production, low comparative benefit and marginalized production areas, continually rising of costs and lowing of planting efficiency, declining of export competitiveness advantages and rapid imports growing, lack of systematic research and its scientific planning, unclear position and irrational distribution in agriculture sector, and lack emphasis from governments and domestic support policies. Therefore, deep study on these issues above has the very important theoretical and practical significance.This dissertation studied the evolving history, development trend, competitive advantages and development strategy of edible beans industry in China, aimed to summarize its basic characteristics and chancing principle of production, consumption, processing, distribution and marketing, explored the households planting-making decision, analysis its comparative benefit and international competitiveness position, builds the strategic framework and systematical policies to promote the edible beans in China. The contents of this paper are as below:1. This dissertation introduced the distribution of edible bean sector in China and the world, made clear about its position in China rural economy and farmers’income. From a global perspective, the global edible bean production increased steadily, keeping the situation of production, sow area and consumption rising in the past two decades. The international trade continued to grow rapidly, which is 24% annually since 1990. The edible beans world trade share of total production was 3% in 1990, and in 2011 the number rose to 17%, which is higher than the share of the world grain share accounting for the world grain production (12%). China edible beans production accounts for 7% of the world, and is the third biggest production country in the world, who keeps the stable development trend in almost 20 years. China is a large edible beans producer, however the edible bean production showed a negative shift relationship with the staple food production, and the edible beans Industry is being weakened. After entering the new century, China edible beans showed a downward trend in acreage and output volatility, and its yields grew slow and fluctuating. The edible beans producing areas are gradually withdrawn from the staple grain producing areas, and are transferring from the fertile soil with good condition land to marginal areas with poor conditions. If not taken the effective measures and the right strategy, the edible beans industry will likely repeat the mistakes of China soybean sector. The study shows that cost-effective is the fundamental factor for farmers planting decision-making. Farmers pursue the maximized revenue and the minimized risk, and try to find the best balance between the above two. The production characters of the edible beans are average small scale, dispersed producing, low degree of organization, households’ multiple planting rather than a single crop planting behavior. Growing different edible beans has significant different costs and benefits in China, and growing edible beans in different regions has different income as well. The study also shows that China’s edible bean processing industry are just started, and the deep processing is future direction for edible beans processing because of the edible beans characters of rich nutrition, unique nutritional properties and health-care affection. The edible beans circulation pattern consists of multi-economic entities, but the still in the sense of less development. Studies shows that, the edible beans industry has significant roles in ensuring regional food security and farmers income, developing local special industry, conserving farmland and protecting ecological environment, promoting agricultural structure adjustment and sustainable development, enhancing the agricultural export competitiveness, improving the national diet and nutrition structure, protecting agricultural diversity and heritage of Chinese food culture.2. This dissertation summarized and analyzed the basic characteristics of Chinese edible bean price fluctuations. The results show that, edible beans are one of the earliest market-oriented agricultural products, and its price is determined by the market. Over the past decade, due to the rising producing costs, as well as the conduction of stable grain prices rise. The study shows that, the price of edible beans has almost the same wave with grain price with a circle of 3-years and 3 waves, but has greater volatility in some year and month. The causes for this volatility are mainly:the edible beans, compared to the stable gain, are luxury products with relative high demand electivity and substitutability, unstable supply and demand; edible beans are the high market-oriented products, its market capacity is relatively small, therefore the speculative is strong and is easy to be hyped; the edible beans prices is easy to be influenced by the conduction of international prices. In addition, expect its frequent annually price fluctuations among different years, there are price fluctuations within different seasons, but also there are significant fluctuations in the price of different seasons due to growing period, seasonal consumption, commercialization rates.3. This dissertation analyzed the household decision behavior and the impact factors by using Logistic model. The study found that there are some relative factors with different negative or positive degree. The higher price of the competitive crop is the most important factor for household to give up the edible beans, and the rising of agricultural inputs gave strong negative impact for edible beans planting. Average household arable land, irrigation condition, technical training and a member of agricultural cooperatives have positive relationship with edible beans growing; while the factors like fertilizer costs, price of competing crops (maize) have significantly negative impacts. This echo is also confirmed that the domestic support policy for staple grain production, like maize production led to the low comparative effectiveness of edible beans, and has negative impact on edible beans production.4. This dissertation analyzed the comparative advantage and international competitiveness of China’s edible beans by using the revealed comparative advantage index and gravity model. The results show that, so far the edible beans are one of the few China’s agricultural products which keep the situation of net international trade surplus after China entering the WTO. The research shows that, the revealed comparative advantage index of edible beans dropped from 12.13 in 1992 to 1.73 in 2011, which means China edible beans has strong international trade advantages but the advantages has been lowed a lot. The comparative advantages also went down from extremely strong degree to relatively strong degree; competitive advantage index decreased from 0.94 in 1992 to 0.49 in 2011, a substantial decline happened in competitive advantage as well. The gravity model analysis showed that, the population growing rate of the export countries, the scale of GDP of the importing country and relative distance to China have the positive impacts on edible beans exporting, the biggest impact factor is the population growing rate of the importing country, followed by the GDP of the importing country, the third is the distance between China and the export destination. The research shows that, the main exporting destinations can be focused on developing countries with high population, such as India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, and some developed countries with high population like US, Japan and so on.5. This dissertation analyzed the characteristics of edible beans consumption and its trend in China. The studies show that, the consumption has distinctive characteristics. For example, edible beans is an important guarantee as a part of traditional diets and nutrition security, the function of edible beans in our country has transferred from food security to nutrition security since 1949, there are many beans varieties for consumption but the consumption are dominated by broad bean and pea. The usage of edible beans has turned from mainly for food to food-forage. The study results show that, the development of edible beans consumption was like V-shaped. The time of early 1990s was a cross-point, the consumption showed a declining trend from the period of 1949-1992, and the bottom time was 1991,1992; the consumption turned to be up from 1993 to now. The main reason for this V-shaped was that, the edible beans function and status in people’s diet has undergone a fundamental change.6. This dissertation explained the development strategy and industrial policies for edible beans sector. The study shows that, the development strategy for edible beans industry should take the policy of "ensuring self-sufficiency, expanding export, optimizing the structure, rational distribution, technology support". In order to promote the sustainable development of China’s edible bean industry, it must be done to build modern science and technology innovation system, modern society service system, modern processing systems and the modern circulation system. The policies should be completed in the fields of structure adjustment, price formation system and domestic support measures.Innovations of this study are as following:Firstly, the study explored China edible bean industry development situation, problems and prospects comprehensively and systematically from the perspective of industrial economics. And the edible bean industry economic analysis framework was constituted, which contributes to the study of this field. The second innovation is about research method. This paper used the revealed comparative advantage and gravity model to analyze the comparative advantage and international competitiveness of China’s edible bean sector. Thirdly, this paper used the logistic model to understand the edible beans households’decision-making behavior. Besides, this paper used SWOT model to analyze the development advantages and disadvantages of China edible beans sector and proposed the development strategy of China edible beans sector and raised constructive thinking of modern edible beans industrial system and relative policy suggestions.