GM crops

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China’s evolving stance on GM crops

In recent months, China has been moving to clarify and adjust rules regarding genetically modified (GM) crops, particularly regarding the growth of such crops domestically.

April 2022 saw the country’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs announce plans to approve two GM corn varieties, following on from three which received a similar green light late last year. All five of these varieties were developed by Chinese businesses or institutions.

The Chinese government also said in 2021 that it wants to support biotech to boost food security while also preventing infringement of intellectual property. It aims to bolster the country’s innovation capacity in agricultural science and technology and help minimise the country’s dependence on major agricultural exporters — particularly the US.

All this is part of a planned regulatory overhaul for the Chinese seed industry, details of which were published in

November 2021 by the Ministry of

Agriculture and Rural Affairs in a draft document. The move is in line with a fiveyear development guideline of the Chinese

Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS).

“It’s a big step,” Liu Shi, Vice President of Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group

Co Ltd, told Reuters in November 2021.

According to Reuters, Dabeinong has several GM traits approved as safe and is expected to be one of the first firms to commercialise GM corn in China.

Insight in January from Gro Intelligence, an agricultural data platform, said that as a result of this changing regulatory environment, GM corn could be planted in

China “as early as 2023”.

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“Though China was the first country to grow GM crops commercially, starting with virus-resistant tobacco plants in 1988,

China could plant up to 33 million hectares with GM corn.

HUA’AN SECURITIES VIA REUTERS

it has lagged behind other nations in adopting new crops,” claims the Alliance for Science, an independent non-profit research institute affiliated with Cornell University.

“GM corn and rice varieties were granted biosafety certificates over a decade ago, but never achieved commercialization, partly due to consumer opposition. Cotton is the only GM crop that is widely grown.”

The country does allow GM crops to be imported for use in animal feed. Moreover, it has also been alleged that GM crops are indeed being grown in China in secret; the Alliance for Science said in 2017 that it was an “open secret that huge areas” within China were being cultivated with rice and corn which had been modified for insect resistance, and a recent Nikkei Asia article referenced “foreign nongovernmental organisations and media outlets” which had made similar claims.

It is understood there is strong resistance from consumers against GM products, in part due to lack of knowledge and understanding of GM technologies and to anti-GMO campaigns seeking to influence public sentiment, often propagated through social media.

Beyond the historically less-thansupportive regulatory environment and the consumer resistance, there may be yet another obstacle to widespread commercialisation; Nikkei Asia also mentions the decline of the profit margin seen in China’s seed industry for the past few years. Contributing to this trend are small and mid-sized players which slightly modify existing seed varieties and sell them as their own.

IMPACTS OF THE CHANGE

China could plant up to 33 million hectares with GM corn, estimates securities brokerage consulting firm Hua’an Securities in a November 2021 note cited by Reuters. The new GM regulations are anticipated to be approved in time for domestic seed companies to ramp up their breeding and seed production activities in

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time for the 2023 growing season.

Hua’an Securities estimates this could generate up to 5 billion yuan in income, while also creating strong market leaders and driving rapid consolidation in the industry. The emergence of companies like Dabeinong Technology or others like Shandong Denghai Seed and ChemChina’s Syngenta business, one of the world’s biggest seed companies, come to mind.

China is, of course, the world’s largest importer of feed ingredients such as soybeans. The overhaul of GM regulations is part of a push to help increase domestic production and move in the direction of greater food security; a plan late last year by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA), which the South China Morning Post characterised as “ambitious”, calls for soybean production to reach 23 million tonnes by 2025, an increase of 6.6 million tonnes compared to domestic production in 2021.

However, this amounts to a mere fraction of the more than 100 million tonnes of soybeans the country imports annually.

Still, even if the impacts on global trade flows are not dramatic, these steps offer the potential for incremental progress, particularly in terms of the environmental impact of crop production. Again in the words of the Alliance for Science, “[China’s] expanded adoption of GM crops is… likely to significantly slash the global use of pesticides.” Moreover, GM herbicidetolerant traits are also seen to contribute to lowering greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) due to reduced fuel use and tillage and increased soil carbon sequestration.

GENE-EDITED VERSUS GM

It is also worth noting the impact that the recent regulatory changes have had on gene-edited crops. As opposed to genetically modified organisms, which have had “entire genes or DNA sequences from other plant or animal species” inserted into their genomes, gene-edited crops have merely undergone “small tweaks” using technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9, explains an article in Nature.

For example, the new rules have loosened the requirements for field trials for gene-edited crops. According to agribusiness research and analysis by IHS Markit, this means that for gene-edited crops, “a production certificate could be applied after the pilot trials, which will reduce the approval timeline from 5-6 years to 1-2 years.”

Still, in this category at least, the rule changes are not all pushing in the direction of a more permissive regime. IHS Markit characterises as “unexpected” the Chinese government’s decision to put gene-edited products as a subcategory of GM products, something it says “shows the Chinese government’s intentions to keep a check on the trade/import of such products through the added requirement for biosafety certificate.”

Nevertheless, Nature claims that “China’s new rules are more conservative than those in the United States — which does not regulate gene-edited crops that incorporate small changes similar to those that could occur naturally — but are more lenient than the tough European Union stance of treating all gene-edited crops as genetically modified (GM) organisms.” By Simon Duke, editor-in-chief