Weighing Up Market Mechanism and Regulated Distribution : China's Dream to Feed Itself Under Spatially-Imbalanced Development

This paper argues that the PGRS policy has set up partitions between provincial food markets and discouraged fully liberalized nationwide food distribution, contributing to insecure food accessibility in China. As long as China maintains its rapid economic development, which is notably spatially imbalanced, this PGRS policy will further undermine its food security dream. Therefore, the policy needs to be adjusted by introducing more market mechanisms. In the second section, a multiregional multisector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model — the SinoTERM model — is used to simulate the pair of contrasting scenarios and to investigate whether the empirical results support this argument