A total of 37 GM corn varieties and 14 GM soybean varieties have been given the green light for commercial planting in a country whose enormous soybean consumption still relies heavily on imports. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs announced the approval on Tuesday.
Finally there's major movement on GMO crops. This is a big deal considering how much potential GMO crops have. I think it's possible for China to be fully sufficient in food, both in calories and luxury foods like meat, quite soon in fact. But this depends on new technology, while China has been extremely slow on the uptake. China needs to change it's regulations and fully support the development of this new technology if it wants rapid development. There's a lot of room for growth here, since yield per surface area in China is quite a bit lower than on other western nations. It also needs to get people to accept this new forms of food. There's tons of potential in genetic engineering to vastly increase food yields, China just needs to actually use and develop the technology.
With climate change, extreme weather and geopolitical tensions messing up the global food supply, I think China really really needs to hasten the rollout of GMO crops. I don't see the reason for continuing to give America so much money and leverage over China food supply.
There's a few main issues I can still see with China's GMO policy, other then the slow implementation speed.
First thing is that GMO crops are still limited for crops meant mainly for livestock, they are not meant for human consumption yet. That needs to change. GMO crops for humans have been a thing for decades, with hundreds of studies backing them up, safely issues really shouldn't be such a contentious topic. There should be GMO variants for every plant and animal that we eat.
Secondly, regulations being so strict and time consuming China, companies are mainly focusing on modification of existing genes, adding, removing or modifying existing gene within a particular crop, which limits things. For example, you can over-express the gene that already exists that regulates resistance to drought in a plant, but you can't add an entirely new gene to a plant that doesn't already have it. This really limits the kind of modifications you can do with a GMO crop. You can't make holy grail crops like C4 rice for example.
Thirdly, no real focus GMO livestock. Unlike GMO crops, there's no policy, 5 year plans, no regulations, nothing. We're probably a decade away from seeing the first GMO livestock on chinese soil. Well work on GMO livestock is slow even in the West due to well founded concerns but it's still years ahead of where China is at, America and Japan already have GMO fast growing fish being farmed. Forget super fast growing chickens or ultra fat cows, just some simple gene editing to help with disease resistance could save China billions every year. And China has the technology for this, it's just a regulation issue.
Fourthly, I can see China falling into the same trap that the rest of the world did, and focus solely on boosting yield and profits via faster growing cycles, pest and herbicide resistance. I think trying to do some novel crop variants like for example golden rice that has vastly more vitamin A has it's uses too. It's not just a race for more yield. If China can develop say a strain of rice that doesn't give that much more yield than conventional strains, but has vastly more protein and other vitamins or nutrients, it's more than worth the loss in yields. Or GMO crops that are great at restoring and maintaining soil quality and topsoil. Or GMO plants that are great at cleaning up heavy metal pollution. GMO crops that don't give any improvements in yield, but need vastly less water for use in farming in arid regions. Trees that produce honey year round. The possibilities are endless.
One big use of genetic engineering, and this is the biggest deal of them all is using genetic technology gene drives to completely wipe out various crop pests forever. Goodbye armyworm, Weevils etc etc forever. Obviously this is a big deal, has tons of potential to go badly and there's a good chance that said gene drive can escape China's borders and render a species extinct worldwide. Oh and it hasn't ever been done before.
Of course if you don't want to render them extinct, there's dozens of methods of using gene drives as pest control that is still much longer lasting, effective, cheaper and healthier than spraying pesticides everywhere. You could use a gene drive to reduce a species's fitness, alter them to have a shorter growing cycle, alter them to die when exposed to a extremely common safe chemical as a pesticide, altering their sex ratio, reduce their resistance to heat and cold, alter them to die when eating a certain rare amino acid then have GMO crops express that particular amino acid, or any other way to permanently reduce their population without constant usage of pesticides.
Even if you don't want to use a gene drive to permanently alter a species's genetics, there's still lots of ways that genetic engineering can help to control pests. Using the sterile insect technique for example. Or via the use of an already existing disease in the pest's population, just altered to be more deadly.
It's frustrating, I feel like with a few policy/regulation changes earlier with GMO crops and livestock, and with a some steady investments into certain key technologies, China can easily be more than self sufficient in it's food supply already. Instead it's probably going to take another decade as the regulations slowly sort themselves out and technology improves. Of course there's other next generation alternative protein/carbohydrate sources like precision fermentation, plant protein, cultured meat, insect protein, industrial synthesis of protein/fat/carbohydrates that China really should be looking more into and investing more into as well. I feel like with China's food security at risk, there really should be more focus on this.
I feel like it's another 2018 semiconductor situation again, where China's complacency really fucked them up and they really only got into high gear once they're in crisis mode. I don't know why, you have the tools, use them before shit hits the fan. I feel like the government is wayyyy too risk adverse for their own good. If this is the approach they're taking when rolling out decades old GMO technology in the middle of a global food crisis, I don't want to see the speed at which they will adopt other more controversial aspects of genetic technology like human gene editing.
