This package describes prevailing trends in major drivers (economic growth—outside agriculture; demography and migration; institutional shifts and changes to domestic policies; technological change; opening up to trade).
Existing agricultural policy models are linked to identify the impact of the developments in China on the rest of the world, in particular the EU and selected developing countries. Off-line commodity-specific exercises will be reported on as well that identify the specific complementarities between China and the EU. Finally, a comparison will be made between the agricultural policies of China and the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, especially with respect to the degree of decoupling of farm support and to the trade measures, and the outcomes from model simulations will be interpreted against that background. Establishing a good database and linkage between established models are the key scientific challenges here.
China's government recently re-affirmed its commitment to contain the widening income gap between rural and urban areas and between the Eastern and Western parts of the country. The impact of these policies also needs to be compared (geographically and by income group) to the effect of trade policy shifts. Input into this activity will be institutional knowledge, combined with an integrated analysis of household surveys. Major challenges are obtaining adequate data sets at household and district level and treating them within a comprehensive framework .
List
Official deliverable or not
Deliverable title
17
YES
Household poverty characteristics (D16-D18), March 2011
The pressures on the environment relate to shortage of water, due to intensified demands as well as to surpluses of nutrients and chemicals. This work-package studies the consequences and the ways to increase resource use efficiency and to reduce pollution (e.g., non-point source pollution) and stress on rural resources (e.g., water). In addition, as the feasible pathways may significantly depend on the prevailing climatic conditions, it also looks into likely consequences of climate change. The ambitions of this package are limited to signaling where pressures might become strongest rather than conducting deeper analysis of bio-physical impacts. This also will be the place where the project can explore the effect the China's current policies and trade reforms will have on the environment as well as experiment with alternative policies that may be able to reduce the adverse effects of trade on the environment.
All threads come together in this work package that seeks to find a good policy mix among the solutions proposed in WP2-WP4, enabling us to arrive at a balanced description of the prospects for agricultural trade between China and the EU.
This work package is devoted to policy dialogue and dissemination. To guide the research, the policy dialogue will take place throughout the project, rather than only towards its completion. We also stress the close interaction that we will have with some of China's top policy makers and government officials as well as with top officials from the EU and from the start of the program in order to build international organizations stakeholdership, until the end of the program when we will work closely together to consider policy options for the future in China's agriculture, its functioning in the global agricultural economy, and China's trade and co-operation with the EU
Besides dealing with various administrative tasks in relation to the EC, the co-ordination work package is mainly devoted to co-ordination itself: i.e. ensuring that the team participants keep on working together in at least as good a spirit as they did in the past, and that delivery profiles and deadlines are being respected.
