Energy Policy 35 (2007) 2065–2078 Resource analysis of the Chinese society 1980–2002 based on exergy—Part 3: Agricultural products B. Chen, G.Q. Chen à National Laboratory for Complex Systems and Turbulence, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China Available online 20 September 2006 Abstract This part is the continuation of the second part on renewable energy sources and forest. The major agricultural products entering the Chinese society from 1980 to 2002 are calculated and analyzed in detail in this paper. The relative political infrastructure and organization of the agricultural production in the rural areas frequently and rapidly changed during the past two decades, making profound impact on the crop structure and yields. The planning and organization of agriculture has been adjusted when prices and market are introduced into agricultural production and the direct planning is restricted. The growth in usage of fertilizers, pesticides and farm-use plastic membrane is revealed. The state farm system as the pioneer of exploring the modernization of agriculture and accumulating experiences is also described. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Exergy analysis; Resource accounting; Agriculture 1. Introduction Agriculture is the foundation of the national economy in China. Agricultural problems, especially concerning the production of grain and other crops, have always been the major preoccupations of the government throughout the modern history. In China with a special tradition as an agricultural civilization and remaining a big agricultural country, agriculture has been termed as equivalent to the industry of harvested crops. Moreover, the administration work of agriculture towards the production of crops by the peasants is presided over by the Agricultural Ministry, which is one of the ministries under the leadership of the State Council. The forest production is organized and supervised by the Forestry Ministry, which is parallel to the Agricultural Ministry. Thus, the agricultural products in this paper refer to the crops harvested by the peasants, excluding the forest, fishery and rangeland product. According to the second law of thermodynamics, exergy is the real scarce resource consumed in the physical irreversible process. Agricultural products enter into society and become commodities. The traditional com- modity accounting is based on the quantities, regardless of the different qualities of the commodities. Exergy account- ing provides a convenient way to unify and measure different types of agricultural products both in quantity and quality. Researches on the agricultural product exergy in the society have been done in Sweden, Japanese, Norway, Canada, Brazil, Turkey and Italy, where appropriate structures of exergy utilization and effective usage of agricultural products are represented and discussed (e.g., Dincer, 2002; Ertesva˚g and Mielnik, 2000; Ertesva˚g, 2001; I ´ lerı´ and Gu¨rer, 1998; Rosen, 1992, 2001; Schaeffer and Wirtshafter, 1992; Sciubba, 2001; Wall, 1977, 1986, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1997a,b; Wall and Gong, 2001a, b). 2. Analysis This paper investigates the agricultural products exergy input to the Chinese society from 1980–2002. For the national-scale system, the exergy input contains the imported, gathered, constrained and extracted agricultural products as exergy carriers (Wall, 1977). The whole ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/enpol 0301-4215/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2006.07.007 à Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 1062767167; fax:+86 1062754280. E-mail addresses: chenb@pku.edu.cn (B. Chen), gqchen@pku.edu.cn (G.Q. Chen).