2004 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Analysis of the world rice market by historical and public economics view points
| Project/Area Number |
14560185
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Agro-economics
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| Research Institution | Kyoto University |
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Principal Investigator |
TSUJII Hiroshi Kyoto University, Graduate School of Agriculture, Professor, 農学研究科, 教授 (60027589)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2002 – 2004
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| Keywords | the world rice market / thin market / politicalgoos / oligopolictic market / wheat / maize / Thailand / America |
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| Research Abstract |
There representative researcher has studied the relationship between the thinness, instability, and unreliability of the world rice market in comparison with the world markets of wheat and maize, and the rice self-sufficiency policy of Asian countries. The first reason of the thinness and instability of the world rice market is the fact that 90% of the world total rice production is created by half a billion small family farms in Asia. Further more, about 0.5 billion of the world total 0.8 billion hungry are concentrated in Asia. The most Asian countries have sought to attain domestic rice price stability by rice self-sufficiency policy because rice is the staple food, the wage goods, and the political goods in the sense that rice price instability leads to domestics political instability. This objective was attained by separating domestic rice markets from the world rice market by the border policy. Consequently domestic rice price stabilization accelerated the fluctuation of the worl
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d trade price of rice. As described above the thinness of the world rice market and Asian rice self-sufficiency policy mutually enforces each other. Thus the thinness of the world rice market will continue to be so in the future. Asain countries will regress to the rice self-sufficiency policy. The level of concentration of the world wheat and maize markets is similar to the world rice market. The level of commodity standardization is more developed fir wheat and maize than rice as shown by the fact that there are efficient fixtures markets for wheat and maize, while there is no efficient futures market for rice. Consequently the world wheat and maize markets are thicker and more stable than the world rice market. These thinness and self-sufficiency policy of the world rice market must be taken into account when international trade rules are negotiated in, e. g, the WTO multilateral trade negotiations.
In 19^<th> century the trade price of wheat and rice were about the same. But in the last half of the 20^<th> century, the world trade price of wheat has become about a half of the world trade price of rice. This change is probably caused by the fact that's faster production growth and technological growth for wheat in the new world was realized in comparison with rice, and this fast wheat production growth has surpassed the growth of wheat import demand. I hypothesize that the relative trade price of wheat to rice has declined a lot, but the level of oligopolistic condition and price stickiness for wheat must have increased.
The final report and several journal papers have been published based on the research results of this research projects. Less
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