Abstract: Government’s policy interventions on agriculture typically have multiple objectives, e.g. to guarantee food security, to improve farmers’ income, to enhance the international competitiveness of domestic agriculture, to promote sustainable agriculture, etc. We first provide the theoretical router to achievable in this paper, and depict the effect of China’s agricultural policy system in recent years on each objective. On this basis, we further show that the multiple policy objectives are theoretically conflicting. Given the current technique, agricultural policy system cannot achieve all objectives at the same time. Therefore, the agricultural policy system in a specific development stage has to be built up on the basis or more objectives corresponding to the key issue in agricultural economics. In so far as it goes, China’s agricultural policy system should relatively weaken the objective of food security and strengthen the objective of international competitiveness.
