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This paper explores the consequences of the growth in China's demand for food on prices in the international markets for agricultural products. It focuses on two current debates in the literature related to the impact of China's growth:

• the strength of China's economic emergence as an explanation for increases in world food prices
• the role of China as an engine of growth for the agricultural exports of other developing countries

The paper uses a gravity model of bilateral trade flows to obtain counterfactual measures of China's inflationary effects on food prices on a country-by-country basis. Analysing the geographic patterns in bilateral trade flows enables the paper to identify the countries that are most affected.

The paper finds:

• China has been a source of aggregated mild price inflation in the largest developed economies that are predominantly food importers
• evaluation of the counterfactual exports of selected exporters indicates that few countries in Latin America (Brazil, Peru), and in Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia), have benefited from China's increased food demand - these countries are oilseed exporters, a commodity group in which China is particularly active

The paper suggests that indirect effects stemming from China's growth are quite small, particularly for countries that do not necessarily export the products that China imports, and it is therefore difficult to conclude that China has been an engine of growth for agricultural exports in general.

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