Here’s how GMOs would solve China’s food crisis

by Adam Minter

With a population of 20% of the world’s population and less than 10% of its arable land, China has long relied on imports to feed its people.

Now, the government increasingly fears that this dependence is leaving the country vulnerable to major agricultural exporters, especially the United States. Given this, could genetically modified organisms be the answer?

Despite the fact that in recent years transgenics, known as GMOshave been gaining widespread acceptance elsewhere, Chinese consumers continue to strongly oppose them. So much so that the government has delayed approval of such crops for decades to avoid a backlash. That could be about to change.

Earlier this month, the Ministry of Agriculture laid the groundwork for growing genetically modified soybeans and grains such as rice and corn for the first time on Chinese soil. The question now is whether the public will trust the government enough to accept such a revolution.

During all this time, humans have cultivated their food by selectively altering genes. In the past, that meant crossing plants and animals with desirable traits to create organisms with greater economic and nutritional value. In that field, China was one of the first innovators: written records of Chinese crop science, including instructions on crossing, date back 2,000 years.

By the 1970s, biotechnology had advanced enough that crop scientists no longer had to struggle with hybrid plants. Instead, they only needed to insert one gene into a cell. In 1988, China became the first country to commercialize a transgenic crop when it approved a virus-resistant strain of tobacco. But problems arose.

In the early 1990s, China National Tobacco Corp. planned to launch a cigarette made with transgenic tobacco called “Gene”. When smokers objected, the name was changed to “China”. The product with the new name also did not reach the market, and genetically modified tobacco was completely phased out from commercial cultivation in 1995.

Elsewhere, as consumers have come to terms with years of accumulating data showing that it is safe to consume, opposition to GMOs has waned. In 1994, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA, according to its acronym in English) of the United States authorized the commercial sale of a genetically modified tomato. This became the first approval of its kind anywhere in the world, and other crops soon followed. By 2020, 90% of corn and soybeans grown in the United States were genetically modified.

Nevertheless, China took a very different path. Starting in the 1980s, food safety scandals across the country have broken out regularly. Some have even achieved international notoriety, as was the case in a 2008 incident in which 300,000 children fell ill from contaminated milk.

Even for those Chinese open to the benefits of GMOs, these scandals cast doubt on the government’s competence in regulating food safety. In 2018, a peer-reviewed survey found that only 12% of Chinese consumers had a positive opinion of GMOs.

Distrustful of this resistance, Chinese officials have only approved the commercial cultivation of genetically modified cotton and papaya, while others remain in the lab. As a result, China it has only become more reliant on foreign GMOs, the import of which is allowed as long as they are processed into products such as animal feed to support China’s growing demand for pork and other proteins.

That dependence has preoccupied Chinese leaders for at least a decade. In 2013, President Xi Jinping requested that the rice bowls be filled “principally”With Chinese beans. In March, a new Five-Year Plan established the “food safety”As a political priority.

The objective of this plan is to achieve the “self-sufficiency”, A term that China began to use after the United States halted semiconductor exports to Huawei Technologies Co. Recently and revealingly, Chinese officials and media have referred to GMO seeds as the “new semiconductors”, So they warned that China is vulnerable without the ability to cultivate its own.

So far, the government has moved faster with chips than with GMOs. But it seems almost inevitable that significant new momentum is coming. In the not too distant future, the Chinese people may simply have to accept the decision, whether they like it or not.