Focus on Arts and Ecology

The big environmental stories in the Chinese media (February 19-25) 

This year could be a momentous one for China’s GM food industry. On 18 February, the ministry of agriculture released a 6-point policy document on “encouraging the original innovation of agricultural GMOs [genetically modified organisms] and regulating the transfer of biological materials”. Hailed as a big opportunity for the commercial growing of GM crops inside China, it sent the share prices of major seed corporations soaring.

The document encourages research efforts to become genuinely innovative, going beyond GM crop varieties already approved, and to benchmark new GM varieties against major conventional varieties currently in use. It vows to accelerate the commercialisation of research outcomes through the market. In it, the government says for the first time that businesses will be made “the dominant force in agricultural GMO research, application and trade”, rather than public research institutions.

At the same time, the document sets out new regulatory requirements. It set up a new reporting system for agri-GMO material transfer, and makes safety certificate holders responsible for the entire lifecycle of their agri-GMOs, from the research and development of seeds, to the trade of agri-products, all the way to their market exit – another indication that commercialisation is on the doorstep.

So far, only two GM crops are allowed to be commercially grown in China, cotton and papaya. Although foreign GM soy and corn can be imported, they can only be used in processing (mainly into feed and edible oil), not for direct human consumption. Chinese public institutions and private companies do possess technologies for developing GM food crops, supported by a major state-level project from 2008 to 2020. Although some of the GM crops they developed received safety certificates for domestic cultivation, none have been given final approval for real-world cultivation, due mainly to the food safety concerns of the public.

But Covid-19 has brought with it new food safety concerns, which, combined with a sense of insecurity triggered by the Sino-US trade war, appear to have changed the thinking on the matter, or simply to have sped up pre-existing domestic development. In December, in its annual meeting on economic policy, the Communist Party emphasised a need to “respect science, carry out strict supervision, and promote the industrial application of transgenic breeding in an orderly manner.” This is reiterated in this year’s No.1 Document, the party’s annual agrarian policy framework. The meeting calls for the “conquering” of “the strangler technologies”, whose patents are controlled by foreign countries, and fighting “a game-changing campaign” in transgenic breeding.

There are speculations that the domestic commercial cultivation of GM grain crops will also become part of the 14^th Five Year Plan, which will be released next week, partly because the party’s proposal for drafting the plan released last year lists “biological breeding” (often a euphemism for transgenic breeding) as one of eight “forward-looking and strategic national major scientific and technological projects”, together with AI, quantum information and aerospace technologies.

(Sources: China Dialogue)