A Research On Eco-economical Efficiency Of Agriculture International Trade

At present, more and more countries have pay attention to the problems about trade and environment because the ecological environmental problem has become an international issue and the international trade has the characteristic being the benefit transmission channel. Furthermore, the agriculture international trade has become a focus in the area of world trade and environment due to its universal, unique externality and multifunction features, especially to the closer mutual dependence of agriculture and natural ecological environment. It is the tendency of pursuing the synthesized eco-environmental, economical and the social benefits of international trade makes the eco-economical efficiency of agriculture international trade be a key research topic.The foundamentals of eco-economical efficiency, the theory of eco-environmental value and the relavent evaluation methods form the theoretical and methometical basis for evaluating the eco-economical efficiency of agriculture international trade, which means the impacts and the changing tendency of agriculture international trade activities on country's eco-environmental quality, economic growth and social development.The widespreading of agriculture production, its character of integrating natural and economical reproduction makes agricultural externality show more popular, special and long-term features. The social and economical multifunctionality caused by agricultural externality determines that the agricultural non-commodity output function and the commodity output function have played the same important role in the development of national economy. Moreover, the agricultural non-commodity output function will play a more important role in the development of human society along with the decreasing proportion to the agricultural commodity output in the entire national economy commodity output. Therefore, it requests that the agricultural development should pursue the coordination and the unification of the economical, social and the ecological environment benefits.Various countries have paid a lot of attention to the agricultural multifunctionality and"non- trade concerns" that has strengthened the important strategic status and the significance at the modern economic society of agriculture: the agriculture has vicariousness; the changed understanding to the important function of agriculture from the purely emphasized the agricultural economical function and the economical contribution to the agricultural Multifunctionality; the pursuit to the coordination of the agricultural economy, social and the ecological environment development, that is the ecology economic efficiency is the function need of the agriculture; the agricultural Multifunctionality and "non- trade concerns" should become the important theory basis to the adjust with the formulation agriculture and the agricultural production trade support policy and the promotion to the agriculture sustainable development.As an economic activity, besides "the general character" to the externality of the general economic activities, international trade is the bridge linking production and consumption of products because it makes domestic market connect with international markets. Therefore, the externality is not only its own economic activity result, but also the diffuse to the production process externality. Along with the international trade scale gradually expansion, the trade externality has more influence to the various countries' economy, social as well as the ecological environment day by day. However, the differences of policies about the domestic economy development and the trade development between the various countries will determine the influence degree of national economy, society and environment caused by trade externality.The different externality of the different trade way, the trade commodity structure has different influences to various countries. From the theoretically analysis, we can know that under the same production technology, the negative externality of the commodity exported under the general trade way is much smaller than that under processing trade. At the same time, the externality of the exported labor-intensive commodity is much smaller than that of the exported resource-intensive commodity. As to the imported commodities, it is opposite. This has indicated that we can obtain more externality benefits through the adjustment to the trade structure and the trade policy. The international trade Multifunctionality also comes from the trade externality, in addition, it has the long-term characteristic and the macro characteristic that has laid the theory basis to the dynamic ecology economic efficiency whichincludes the economical, the society ecological environment benefit, through international trade including agricultural production trade.Traditional international trade theory can not explain influences that international trade put on ecological environment benefit, as well as environmental conditions put on international trade because traditional international trade theory mainly places its emphasis in the economic interests of trade. But as more and more countries use policies of environment and trade and domestic environmental policies to limit and even prevent the imports, research on the relation of trade and environment and the competition of environment has been paid more attention to. Though there are no definite conclusions, more and more countries put emphasis in the effects between trade and environment when they formulate their trade policies. As China is the great country in production and export of agricultural goods, we must change our emphasis from pursuing the economic and social interest of agricultural products to the comprehensive interest including environmental interest when we make trade policies and implement strategies of agricultural goods.The unification between natural reproduction and economical reproduction in agriculture has determined that the trade of agricultural products has inevitably natural ecological and environmental benefit. There are many results through real diagnoses and observation experience about the negative and positive influences of agricultural production on climate, land use effects, agricultural landscape, biodiversity as well as ecological equilibrium. Since agricultural products have the features of water resource and land resource intensity, the grain trade should display obvious water resource and land resource benefit and the data analysis has proved this fact. But the change in the water resource and land resource benefit of the grain trade can not certainly keep pace with the change of grain net trade turnover. This indicated that the realization of the water resource and land resource importation benefit or economic effect through expanded grain trade does not certainly depend on the pursuit to grain trade deficit, which is same to other agricultural products. This discovery provides important political analytic basis for us to use the content of hypothesized water or water consumption in unit products, land utilization amount of unit products of different agricultural products as the criterion. And it can help us distribute agricultural factor resource reasonably, adjust agricultural products quantity, processing and structures of importation and exportationvarieties and realize the unification of economic benefit, social benefit and ecological and environmental benefits.The agricultural product trade has played an important role in the development of national economy, including the contribution to foreign exchanges, the contribution to other products, the contribution to the market and the contribution to factors, etc. But along with the drop of agriculture's status in national economic development and the change of its role, and though its absolute trade turnover and increasing rate continuously rise, its proportion decreases in entire foreign trade, which reflects that the actual contribution of agriculture to the development of national economy is decreasing. However, the status of the agricultural products' trade in the development of agricultural economy has been increasing, which shows that the trade of agricultural products is playing an increasingly important role in the development of agricultural economy. It is very important to the development of agriculture and rural economy to keep the sustainable and healthy development of agricultural products.It is the production and marketing features of agricultural products that decides the employment benefit of its trade, which is different with the employment benefit of the trade in other normal processing industries and most manufacturing industries. But the analysis of data shows that the pulling role of the import of agricultural products to employment also constantly increases as the proportion of labor intensive agriculture rises. As to China, whose agricultural population occupies the preferential place, it is still the main choice to display the employment benefit of agricultural products through displaying labor force comparison superiority and expanding the exportation of labor-intensive agricultural products in the very long future. Grain trade, as the large amount agricultural products, has played a very important role in the social stability and the safety of Chinese grain in these years. But the developmental strategy of the grain trade should continuously be adjusted complying with the content of grain safety, which should be transformed from simple satisfaction to multiple goals of the need of people's "grain ration" to guarantee of "food safety", adjustment to grain planter structure and structure of agricultural and rural industry, improvement of water resource and land resource utilization, etc.From the viewpoints of pursuing eco-economical efficiency, considering the present natural resources and eco-environmental conditons of China, as well as the internationalcompetition power of the agricultural products, we should take new trade development strategies for agricultural product. They are the "dynamic comparative advantage" competitive strategy and "ecological trade" development strategy. To ensue the fulfillment of above-said two development strategies, we should put into effect new policies and measures as follows: limited and selective free trade policy within WTO multilateral trade system; reinforce the cooperation of agriculture industrial policy, trade policy and environmental policy; implenmenting more effective human capital investing policy; carrying out ecological agriculture and sustainable agriculture developing policy; actively cultivating new comparative factors; putting into effect flexible food scurity and foodstuff trade policy; building up the evaluation index system for evaluating the eco-economical efficiency of agricultural international trade.