Since the middle 1990s, a research team led by Prof. HUANG Jikun from Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy (CCAP) has been continuously working on the development and application of Agricultural Policy Analysis and Decision Support System (DSS).

This DSS has been improved and updated overtime. It is composed of three major models. They are the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model with substantially improvement on China’s database, the National Computable General Equilibrium (CGE), and the Partial Equilibrium Model of Agricultural Sector with 22 commodities. Meanwhile, the automatic linkage mechanism has been constructed to reflect the inter-relationship among three models through trades, prices and other economic variables. In order to evaluate the effects of global biofuel development, the input-output relationship of biofuel production sectors in different biofuel producing countries and substitutability between biofuel and gasoline are incorporated in DSS. Based on the improved data and models, several researches has been conducted to assess the impacts of global bioufel development on agricultural production, consumption, trade, price and food security in many countries/regions (e.g., North America, EU, Some Asia regions and Africa countries).  

On policy analysis, the DSS has also been used to analyze the effects of global, regional and China’s biofuel development in GMS regions (the Greater Mekong Sub-region), China and the rest of world. It reveals that global biofuel development (mainly produced by USA, EU and Brazil) will significantly affect the international agricultural prices and global agricultural production and trade.  Meanwhile, the prices of agricultural commodities in GMS and China will also increase substantially. There are two major mechanisms that biofuels can significantly affect agriculture. First, the agricultural commodities market and the energy market are closely connected through biofuel. Secondly, agricultural output prices are affected by agricultural input prices due to changes in energy price. The extent of effects highly depends on the international oil price and the substitutability between biofuels and gasoline.