Jikun Huang, Scott Rozelle, and Mark w. Rosegrant 755 greater(or to 1% per year increases in erosion and salinity). Even at this level of environmental stress, projected grain imports in 2020 only rise to 51 MMT. Unless the effect of environmental stress is exponential and the government is unwilling(or unable) to invest in rectifying the ad- verse aspects of the deteriorating environment, these findings indicate that Brown's pessimism is unfounded. 60 China has other food policy alternatives, including turning to inter national meat markets to satisfy its food needs, instead of importing grain as feed. China currently is a net exporter of meat, mostly to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. If the model allowed for meat imports, China might choose to buy meat on global markets, a move that would reduce projected feed grain imports but not total agricultural trade volume. If China imported a quantity of meat equal to 10% of its 2000 meat de- mand, grain net imports in 2020 could be reduced to 6 MMT from the baseline of 30 MMT when China relies completely on domestic sources of meat. Without good refrigeration or transportation infrastructure, how- ever, meat imports will be constrained in the near future. In fact, many developing countries prefer to import feed grain and undertake the value added activity in their own country. If high grain imports are unaccept able under China's current political doctrine, importing meat may be one way around such an ideological constraint IX. Conclusions The purpose of this article is to examine trends in China's grain econ- omy, review the current set of studies that project future supply and de- mand trends, and then, on the basis of more comprehensive and structur ally sound, econometrically estimated models, explore the factors that may be behind these alternative predictions. Our framework includes a demand-side model that, in addition to the effects of income and popula- tion trends(as well as income response parameters that vary as income levels rise), accounts for the effects of urbanization and the changing vel of the development of rural consumption markets. The supply re- sponse model considers the effect of prices, public investment in re- search and irrigation, institutional change, and environmental factors The projections show that, under the most plausible expected growth rates in the important factors(most of which are broadly consis- tent with the major projection models of the Economic Research Service Carter and Zhong; and Rosegrant, Agcaoili, and Perez), Chinas imports will rise steadily throughout the next decade. 6 By 2010, imports are ex- pected to reach 28 MMT Increasing imports arise mainly from the accel erating demand for meat and feed grains, as well as from the continued slowing of supply due to reduced investment in agricultural research in the late 1980s. Grain imports are expected to stabilize after 2010, how ever,as demand growth slows because of increasing urbanization and Copyright@ 1999. All rights reserved.Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved