A farmer harvests corn outside Weifang, East China's Shandong Province in September 2015. File photo: IC

Corn prices have dropped significantly compared with the level in 2014, according to data from industry websites, and experts said Sunday that corn prices may remain weak in the near future.

Corn prices have declined around 20 percent compared with last year. The corn was bought by traders at around 2.1 yuan ($0.33) per kilogram last year, but this year the price has dropped to around 1.6 yuan per kilogram, said Chang Liansheng, a farmer in Changzhi, North China's Shanxi Province.

"I can barely earn money from growing corn," Chang told the Global Times on Sunday.

The price of wheat has also dropped compared with last year, media reports said. These falling grain prices will greatly eat into farmers' income, which will hit consumption and put more downward pressure on economic growth, according to Ma Wenfeng, an analyst at Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultant Co.

The central government is set to release the official GDP data for the third quarter on Monday, and economists have predicted that the reading may drop below 7 percent.

Ma noted that high grain production volume, high inventories and low international grain prices are the major reasons behind the drop in domestic grain prices.

In 2014, China's total grain production reached 607 million tons, up 0.9 percent year-on-year, marking the 11th consecutive year that saw a year-on-year increase in grain production, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. And experts believe that grain production will grow again this year.

However, domestic grain prices are still much higher than international prices due to high production costs and low efficiency. The price per ton of imported corn is around 1,000 yuan lower than that of domestic corn, according to data from cnagri.com, an industry portal operated by Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultant Co.

Prices of imported wheat and rice are also much lower, according to Ma.

Import volumes have surged due to the lower prices. China imported a total of 4.37 million tons of corn in the first eight months this year, up 173 percent year-on-year, data from cnagri.com showed.

Weng Ming, an expert at the Rural Development Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, noted that international grain prices are expected to drop further, as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) moves forward, with trade tariffs among member economies likely to be reduced greatly during the process.

"China should enhance the competitiveness of its agriculture sector, not only in terms of quality of the grain, but also in terms of prices," Weng told the Global Times on Sunday, noting that the TPP could be a major blow to Chinese agriculture.

Ma said that a recently announced drop in reserve collecting prices was also part of the reason for the drop in corn prices. The government on September 18 announced that the collecting price for State corn reserves was set at 2 yuan per kilogram, which was the first drop since the reserve mechanism was launched in 2008.

Ma believes that the government should offer farmers more help, such as subsidies, in order to maintain farmers' consumption power.

However, Weng said that the drop in reserve collecting prices has been a "discrete" decision from the government which has reflected changes in the international market, and he said that the "market should play a major role in the transition to make China's agriculture more competitive."

The government is also considering measures to increase demand for corn in a bid to stabilize the market. China is set to resume building new corn-based ethanol plants after a nearly decade-long ban, in a move that could help absorb the country's record stocks, Reuters reported Friday.