reformingchinasseedindustry.docVIP

Reforming China’s Seed Industry: Transition to Commercialization in the 21st Century Jikun Huang, Scott Rozelle, and Ruifa Hu* * Jikun Huang and Ruifa Hu are director and research fellow, respectively, in the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy. Scott Rozelle is associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Davis. Huang and Rozelle are both CIMMYT Research Affiliates. The authors would like to thank Erika Meng, Michael Morris, and Carl Pray for comments on this paper and earlier work on this subject. The support of the Agricultural Science Foundation of the Rockefeller Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. Reforming China’s Seed Industry: Transition to Commercialization in the 21st Century China’s grain sector, the largest in the world, is interesting not only by virtue of its enormous scale, but also because it has been expanding in the midst of rapid transition from plan to market. Crop output expanded rapidly after decollectivization in the early 1980s. Since 1985, government have gradually unleashed a series of reforms aimed at liberalizing grain, fertilizer, and labor markets (Sicular, 1995; Xiao and Fulton, 1997; Hallee, 1995). Unlike the problems encountered in European reforming economies (Lin, Cai, and Li, 1994), China’s measures have succeeded in sustaining agricultural growth at the same time markets and rural institutions have been evolving to become more efficient, integrated, and competitive (Rozelle et al., 1997). Ironically, despite a greater need than ever for an efficient seed system to service producers during the era of rapid expansion, liberalization in the sector has taken off later and proceeded slower than almost any other part of the agricultural economy. Crop breeding research and the technology it has produced have contributed more to post-reform agricultural growth than any other factor, including output price increases, irrigation e