Chinese vice premier stresses cotton pricing reform

BEIJING - Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang has urged efforts to improve the experiment on a target price system for home-grown cotton.

On an inspection tour to Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Wang said the experiment will help improve the country's agricultural products pricing mechanism and give full play to the market's role in allocating resources.

China started the experiment for cotton in Xinjiang earlier this year. Under the target price system, the government will subsidize farmers to ensure their earnings when market prices fall below a preset target price.

The vice premier visited households, farms and companies in Xinjiang to solicit opinions for improving the pilot program.

The government must strive to make the pilot program easy to implement, decide the subsidy amounts in a scientific way and optimize the procedure for handing out the subsidies, Wang said.

Confronted with shortage in cotton supply, China should make the information about cotton imports and sales of government cotton reserves more transparent in order to stabilize market expectation, he said.

The country should also support companies to purchase cotton and encourage growers to sell cotton at satisfactory prices, Wang added.

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