Comparative Study Between China & Japan's Trade Protection Policies On Agricultural Products

China has been a member of the WTO for about ten years, and during this period, it witnessed a great development on china's foreign trade, especially the agricultural products, whose trade volume enlarged significantly. However, after china's accession to the WTO, its agricultural products are hugely impacted by the international market, and the imports of agricultural products increase sharply, and the deficit is widening year after year. China's products have comparative advantages on labor-intensive products, such as livestock, flowers, fruits and vegetables, while grains and other land-intensive products have comparative disadvantages. Excessive imports threaten our food security, and the import volumes of some agricultural products such as soybean have been much more than that of domestic production, and the domestic prices of these products including related downstream products such as edible oil and feed are highly influenced by the fluctuation of external market, which caused a lot of losses to the suppliers and consumers of these agricultural products and the related downstream products. So these problems require us to review our current agricultural trade protection policies. Though there have been so many changes on china's laws and administrative regulations on foreign trade to get the accession to the WTO, the policy system is not strong. Some trade issues have no legal basis lacking of laws and legislations on foreign trade, and the effectiveness of some measures should be questionable. Tariff measures fail to play its roles. And non-tariff measures such as tariff quotas with very low tariffs within the determined quota volume, and the volume is very close to that in the situation with no regulation. In addition, the problems of agricultural trade protection policy also reflect that there are few practical measures of technical barriers on agricultural trade, and the franchise system is rigid. So, it's necessary to re-examine our agricultural trade policy. In contrast, Japan which shares some characteristics with china on the natural conditions and the consumption structures of agricultural products has quite effective trade protection policies on agricultural products. Although Japan's agricultural trade policies have gradually developed to the direction of liberalization. But due to the considerations of food security, economy, politics and other factors, the country's agricultural trade policy is still regarded as the effective protection of their domestic agricultural production. Japan's agricultural trade protection policies embody in the strict and careful biases of the rice imports. The combination of legislative, administrative and exclusive trading system ensures the integration of Japanese agricultural trade policies which maintain domestic food security and domestic stability in agricultural production. The effectiveness of Japan's agricultural trade policy is secured by the effective measures in practice. Either their tariff measures or non-tariff measures play their roles both in price and trade volume on imports. The technical trade measures in the country is a very typical system of agricultural trade protection, which become barriers for China to come across and provide good cases for the improvement of china's trade protection policies on agricultural products. This article analyses the problems of china's agricultural trade protection policies compared with those of Japan, and advises on the improvement of china's agricultural trade protection policy. For tariff and non-tariff measures, they should pay more efforts to improve the tariff structure and adjust the tariff level, and try to make an integrated system of import quotas. Technical trade measures should be more effectively involved in the management in order to further improve the agricultural policies and measures of china.