Study On Agricultural Products Trade Of CAFTA

From the initiation of China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) in 2002 till now, bilateral trade has made positive achievements. Several rounds of negotiations on the free trade of agricultural products in CAFTA have been made from year of 2004. Trade of agricultural products under " Early Harvest Program" in CAFTA and trade of normal products under《Agreement on Commodity Trade》between China and old members of ASEAN have fulfilled zero-tariff in 2010. And the tariff removal of normal products is going smoothly in new members of ASEAN.CAFTA is the first FTA that China has participated. With the largest population, it is also the biggest FTA between developing countries. Except Singapore, members of CAFTA are all agricultural countries which are of abundant agricultural resources. Due to the special geographical locations climate and similar living habits, products complementation of different agricultural categories or same category of different quality or mature date is obvious. China and ASEAN both show great demand to each other, thus trade space is huge. Undoubtedly, the tariff removal plan influences the agricultural trade, especially when the categories under tariff removal plan^ range of tariff removal,countries involved in the tariff removal plan are relatively in favor of ASEAN. Consequently, the research on CAFTA agricultural trade is full of realistic meaning:First, it is helpful for China to expand the export of products with advantages and improve the export competitiveness. Second, it is beneficial to coordinate the domestic plants structure to meet the market demand in ASEAN and enhance the general degree of fitting between export structure and products with competitiveness or advantages. Meanwhile, the analysis on crash to China's agriculture will impose advice to the FTA partners-choosing,order of FTA foundation,category and process of tariff removal.With the help of relevant theory,vast amount of data and various indexes, it illustrates bilateral agricultural trade pattern from the perspectives of trade amount,trade balance and structure,trade benefits, etc. Then it explains the trade pattern and forecasts track of trade development in future on the base of research on RCA of the products in the last 10 years. After due analysis, it draws the following conclusion:First, remarkable trade increase can be seen on agricultural trade in CAFTA, especially the import of China. China presents high amount of deficits. Second, trade between two parties shows transparent structural traits. The export from China mainly focus on labor-intensive products like temperate vegetables and fruits,fish and processed products. Import to China mainly focuses on land-intensive products like rubber,vegetable oil and fruits. Generally speaking, China mostly imports from Indonesia,Malaysia as well as Thailand and exports to Indonesia,Malaysia,Thailand,Vietnam Singapore and Philippine alike. Third, based on the calculation of trade benefits, ASEAN seizes more benefits than China. Besides, it notices that most trade products between both parties are the products of advantages. ASEAN has more products with higher comparative advantages. The top 3 products which account for 70% of the export of each party haven't changed in the past decade. We conclude that the trade direction and structure will keep unchanged in the near future.In the end, this thesis summarizes the crash to China's agriculture as well as its reason and trade bacteria, suggests relevant methods to promote CAFTA bilateral agricultural trade.The paper analyzes agricultural trade from a larger scope, not only on the agricultural products under "Early Harvest Program". It uses more than ten years' data to demonstrate bilateral agricultural trade amount trade balance and structure, precisely calculate the RCA,the I/E proportion of ten basic categories. More importantly, it calculates the RCA of grain,vegetables and fruits from a more specific category. All analysis makes the conclusions more believable.On the other hand, because of huge work of data collection and calculation, it fails to catalog the agricultural products which are not of great competitiveness between China and ASEAN into tinier categories and calculate RCA index which is a little disappointing.