Feeding the Dragon and the Elephant: How Agricultural Policies and Trading Regimes Influence Consumption in China and India

Author(s)

Katherine Baldwin, Joanna Bonarriva

China and India have posted impressive growth rates over the past decade, but face a number of challenges to sustained growth, including bureaucratic hurdles, large swaths of populations in poverty, and policy regimes that are sometimes at odds with global trade norms. These issues factor heavily in the evolving agricultural sectors of each country. Both China’s and India’s agricultural policies are developed out of a concern for domestic food security, and both nations use that objective as a justification for their policy regimes. But aside from this overarching goal, what do these countries have in common when it comes to agricultural trade? In this paper, we undertake a systematic analysis of the agricultural sectors of China and India, comparing and contrasting both domestic policies and trade regimes, and exploring how these regimes affect agricultural trade levels in both countries.