The Impact Of GMO Labeling Regulatory On The Crop Exports

The commercialization of transgenic biotechnology is rapidly advancing throughout many parts of the world. By2011, the number of countries planting genetically modified (GM) crops grew to twenty-nine and the total area planted to GM crops has reached160million hectares. This rapid spread of technology and controversies associated with it have caught the attention and concern of governments, academia, and the public. The commercial application of transgenic technology has great benefit to food security, improvement of eco-environment and sustainable development of agriculture. However, the level of biotechnology, regulatory capacity of security and advantages in international trade finally determines the strategy orientation of agricultural development. To prevent the technical risk, bio-safety regulatory system should be in the light of the orientation of agricultural strategy. Therefore, based on the background of global commercialization of biotech crops, it’s significant for the improving the bio-safety regulatory system of China and distinguishing the future of agricultural development to analyze the inner relationship between bio-safety labeling policies and agricultural trade.This paper chooses the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, Canada, India and China as samples of genetically modified crop promotion countries, and soybean, maize and cotton as objects to research the impact of GMO labeling regulatory on genetically modified crop exports. Firstly, this paper overviews the production and trade of genetically modified crops of the whole world and the sample countries. And then, the relevant GMO safety laws and regulations of sample countries are applied to compare the differences in the rules of transgenic label and transgenic label threshold. At last, short panel data of genetically modified crops is used to analyze the impact of GMO labeling regulatory, technological innovation capacity, market structure and other probable factors on export trade of soybean, maize and cotton by individual effects model. The conclusions are as follows:Under the same conditions of market and technical factors, the degree of transgenic crop commercialization has significant positive relationship with the main crop exports, higher threshold can obviously promote the exports, while voluntary labeling or mandatory labeling has little effect on the main crop exports. The impact of GMO safety regulatory policy on exports is reflected in country differences.In the end. couples of policy recommendations to control the GMO security and improve the policies are put up with according to the model estimates.