Forecast and analysis of the soybean import in China

Soybean is an important crop in China. Before 1996, China was a net exporter of soybean, however the situation changed and the import has increased dramatically since then. The import in 2003 exceeded the total domestic soybean production in 2002. The surprising increase concerns many scholars and policy-makers in China. Up to now, the major researches are qualitative analysis. The main reason for the scarcity of quantitative analysis is about the data availability and dramatic change in such a short time. Grey system is a very powerful tool to analyze undetermined problems and require small numbers of data to make a prediction. We choose the GM (1,1) model to simulate the soybean import in next five years. Based on our projection, we propose some comments and advice.