This title was first published in 2003. This prominent and commanding volume collates the best research available on China's agricultural trade. Critically analyzing the agricultural supply and demand factors that underlie trade patterns such as agricultural productivity and policy, it also explores China's agricultural trade and policy including implications for China and elsewhere. Long term issues and productivity growth are taken into consideration, as are specific issues such as WTO accession. The slate of authors combines the leading established scholars in the field and the best of the next generation, including those from China and the West.

China is perhaps the most prominent example of a developing country that has transitioned from taxing to supporting agriculture. In recent years, Chinese price supports and subsidies have risen at an accelerating pace after they were linked to rising production costs. Per-acre subsidy payments to grain producers now equal 7 to 15 percent of those producers' gross income, but grain payments appear to have little influence on production decisions. Chinese authorities began raising price supports annually to bolster incentives, and Chinese prices for major farm commodities are rising above world prices, helping to attract a surge of agricultural imports. U.S. agricultural exports to China tripled in value during the period when China's agricultural support was accelerating. Overall, China's expansion of support is loosely constrained by World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments, but the country's price-support programs could exceed WTO limits in coming years. Chinese officials promise to continue increasing domestic policy support for agriculture, but the mix of policies may evolve as the Chinese agricultural sector becomes more commercialized and faces competitive pressures.

In short, Putterman connects the field of economics with other important spheres of life, building bridges of understanding that are too often absent in the study of economics.".

Agricultural landholdings in China have an average size of only 0.53 hectares and are divided over six different plots on average. This very high degree of land fragmentation is likely to impose important constraints to current government policies aimed at supporting the incomes of rural households, raising domestic grain production, and promoting the overall production capacity of agricultural sector in order to meet the challenges posed by foreign competition. The purpose of this study is to examine the causes of this extremely high degree of land fragmentation and its consequences for food production in China. The analysis focuses in particular on rice smallholders in Jiangxi Province, a major rice production base of China.