Keywords: corn
In January 2018, China’s Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) held a conference on market information of key agricultural products. It inform the market operation of major agricultural products in 2017, and reminded that it was inappropriate to blindly expand corn planting in 2018 to avoid the situation of increasing output without increasing income.
Tang Ke is director of the Department of Market and Economic Information of the MOA. He said that in 2017, the agricultural product market has generally maintained a smooth operation in China. Price of corn has shown a sign of strong trend. The prices of other bulk-farm products declined slightly but remained generally stable. The feature of “market pricing” has become more obvious.
On the future interaction effect of corn acreage and market situation, Mr. Tang added that although China has reduced the corn acreage in the past two years, its corn stocks are still at a relatively historic high level. As the recent price of corn in market were recovering, the enthusiasm of farmersto plant corn is expected to increase. Therefore, Mr. Tang warned that it would be better to make arrangements reasonably for next spring production plan according to market trends. He particularly stressed that farmers should not blindly expand corn planting in non-dominant regional to avoid the situation of increasing output without increasing income.
In the meantime, the impact of imported agricultural products on domestically produced food will further increase. In 2007, the value of import and export of agricultural products in China reached record high. Driven by demand pull and import price advantage, the import growth of agricultural products was significantly higher than that of export, and the trade deficit continued to expand. Soybean was still the largest import variety of agricultural products, and its imports reached 85.99 million tonnes.
Source: Think Real
