Growth and Export Performance of Rice from India

Abstract

With the emergence of World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, it was expected that India would be benefited through multilateral trade, as it enjoys comparative advantage with reference to majority of the agricultural commodities and also fulfill the import requirements like pulses, edible oils, technology etc. In this context, this study pertains to analyse the growth and export performance of Indian (non-basmati) rice in the international market, as its performance has undergone paradigm shift through the tremendous structural and qualitative changes. The important research questions viz., growth in export performance, export competitiveness of Indian rice and the dynamic nature of its trade pattern during through employing the first order Markov process were analysed in this study. It was found that though India is the world's largest rice exporting country, it has been facing stiff competition from neighboring Asian countries like Thailand and Vietnam majorly. Though the growth rate in MSP of paddy is on the decline during post-WTO regime compared to pre-WTO regime, this is sufficient enough to escalate the DMPs at a faster pace over and above its IPs. However, as rice being the staple food crop in India, the imports both in terms of quantity and value showed declining trend and on the contrary, the exports both in terms of quantity and value showed significant increasing trend during both pre and post-WTO regimes.