Timely adopt trade relief to deal with excessive import of agricultural products

In recent years, with the transformation of the world macroeconomic situation and the widening price gap between domestic and foreign agricultural products, the scale of China's agricultural products import has expanded step by step. A large number of imported agricultural products have played a positive role in ensuring the effective domestic supply, promoting the adjustment of industrial structure, and alleviating the pressure on domestic resources and environment. However, the rapid growth of imports of some important agricultural products has brought severe challenges to the healthy and sustainable development of domestic industries, resulting in difficult sales of domestic agricultural products, serious overstock of domestic agricultural products, and great damage to the interests of producers and processing enterprises. the process of industrial integration is blocked. In view of the sharp increase in imports and the damage to the industry, the space for trade policy and domestic price support policy is limited, and there is a lack of effective and effective policy means to deal with import shocks, so there is an urgent need for innovative measures to deal with excessive imports. In addition to practicing internal skills and gradually cultivating their own competitiveness, it is also necessary to solve the problem of industrial damage in the agricultural field as a whole, strengthen trade relief, and normalize and institutionalize safeguard measures. In the past, the research on industrial injury mainly focused on the trade level, especially the industrial damage caused by dumping and subsidies. However, from the impact caused by the import of agricultural products in the past two years, a large number of imports of agricultural products are not caused by the dumping or subsidy policies of the main producing countries. For example, the domestic sugarcane industry has high cost and weak competitiveness, and the cost of sugar production is 2.2, 2, and 2.3 times that of Brazil, Thailand and Australia, which cannot resist large imports of foreign sugar. It is difficult to initiate anti-dumping and countervailing measures for normal and fair imports of some countries. Therefore, the problem of industrial damage should be examined from a broad perspective, and industrial damage should be regarded as "a state and result". No matter whether there is improper trade behavior or not, as long as the healthy and sustainable development of industry is impacted by imports, the "damage" here does not involve the inevitable relationship between trade and industrial damage, but emphasizes a state and result. Under the WTO system, safeguard measures, anti-dumping and countervailing measures are the three trade remedies most frequently used by members to protect domestic industries. Because the implementation conditions of safeguard measures are more stringent than anti-dumping and countervailing measures, among the three major trade relief measures, anti-dumping, countervailing and safeguard measures, safeguard measures are the least used trade relief measures. According to WTO "Finddisputescases" statistics, there were a total of 46 cases of adoption of safeguard measures from 1997 to 2015. From the perspective of the types of products involved, most of them are iron and steel industrial products, of which 14 involve agricultural products, mainly dairy products and sugar products. From the impact of excessive sugar import, domestic sugar squeezing enterprises have a large-scale loss, and the loss tends to worsen. Profits of sugar companies fell to 1.84 billion yuan in 2014, down from 13.28 billion yuan in 2011, and the number of loss-making enterprises reached 211. The net income of sugarcane farmers decreased by 4.2 billion yuan due to the reduction of sugarcane price (compared with 500yuan / ton). In the case of continuous damage to the industry, the scale of sugar import should be curbed through safeguard measures as soon as possible, and the compensation mechanism for industrial damage should be constructed.

Taking trade relief measures is not only a right conferred by WTO rules, but also a legal means conferred by China's "two countervailing and one safeguard" regulations. There are special agreements on anti-dumping, countervailing and safeguard measures in WTO rules. After China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the regulations on safeguard measures were promulgated on January 1, 2002. Taking safeguard measures is the most simple, feasible and effective means to slow down trade damage and ensure industrial security. The core content is to impose additional tariffs on imports or impose quantitative restrictions on imports on the basis of existing tariffs. As long as the extent of the tariff is enough, after the additional tariff is imposed, the price of imported sugar entering the domestic market will be raised, which can effectively reduce the impact and damage of imports on the sugar industry.

When adopting safeguard measures, the quantity trigger mechanism is relatively appropriate. According to the WTO special safeguard measures and the corresponding bilateral trade agreements, the trigger mechanism of safeguard measures can be divided into quantity trigger and price trigger. From a policy point of view, the quantity trigger mechanism is very intuitive and easy to operate, and can be activated as long as the customs statistics reach the trigger standard. The sufficient and necessary conditions of the trigger conditions of the safeguard mechanism can be simply described as: the decline of international prices, the imbalance of internal and external price comparison, and the scale of imports out of control.

In view of the problems caused by the surge in imports, not only involving sucrose, but also spread to other agricultural products, in terms of industrial development, especially involving the livelihood of a large number of small farmers, we should build an early warning system of industrial security as soon as possible. In terms of the current disposal methods, agricultural departments at all levels take more administrative orders or remedial actions, and hope that processing enterprises can fulfill more social responsibilities at the operational level. However, for the competent departments of the industry, it is suggested that the early warning system of industrial safety should be set up as soon as possible, and the safety early warning index of agricultural products import should be constructed as soon as possible. It is suggested that the relevant institutions should establish a consultation mechanism, give some financial subsidies or tax concessions to the relevant enterprises after the early warning is triggered, and at the same time strengthen border management and inspection and quarantine of imported goods. Strategically, the safety net should proceed from the needs of industrial risk management and build a clear, focused and coordinated industrial support policy system, so that farmers' normal production and farmers' income will not be further harmed. At least it can maintain or restore the status quo that the industry has not been impacted. In operation, we can take the American agricultural safety net as the model, fully consider the specific situation of China's agriculture, and comprehensively use policy tools such as monitoring system, negotiation strategy, income subsidy, insurance and credit, actively and steadily promote the formulation and implementation of relevant policies, and provide omni-directional and multi-level three-dimensional safety net protection. In addition, compensation and assistance for domestic industries, considering the actual situation of domestic small-scale production and decentralized operation, it is difficult to provide compensation assistance directly to peasant households, and consideration can be given to focusing on supporting the industry itself. including capital and equipment investment, technical assistance, used to consolidate infrastructure, the introduction of excellent varieties and advanced production technology and so on.