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Huang
Dafang, former director of
the Chinese Academy of
Agricultural Sciences’ (CAAS) Institute
of Biotechnologies, says the programme could
receive as much as 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) over the next
five years - five times more than the country spent on GM research
in the preceding five years.
A member
of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference
(CPPCC), China’s upper house, and a key government
advisor on biotechnology policies, Huang revealed the news at a
briefing on the annual report of the International Service for the
Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), a non-profit
organisation promoting agricultural biotechnology.
The ISAAA
report indicates in 2007 a total of 114.3 million hectares of GM
crops were cultivated worldwide - an increase of 18.3 per cent from
2006.
The most
widely adopted GM crop is Bt cotton, engineered to produce a toxin
from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) to fight
bollworm. China has developed GM petunias,
tomatoes, sweet peppers, poplar and papaya, and several varieties
of rice but to date policymakers have only allowed GM cotton to be
marketed.
Huang says
that yield, quality, nutritional value and drought resistance will
be major targets of the new research programme. As well as rice and
cotton - which have been the focus of GM technology research in the
past - corn and wheat will also now be priority crops for
research.
Receptive farmers
Hu Jifa is chief research fellow at the the Chinese Academy of
Sciences (CAS) Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy (CCAP),
China’s chief think tank on food policy
issues.
He
confirms the programme is set to go ahead and says that funding for
research on safety and environmental monitoring will be included in
the programme.
The GM
seeding programme was mentioned in China’s 11th Five-year science
and technology development plan (2006-2010) but decisions on the
funding and scope of the programme have been delayed for two years
due to the sensitivity of the area, Hu
says.
But
policymakers are now more receptive to GM technologies, says Hu,
and that could lead to more GM crops getting the go-ahead for
commercialisation.
Judy Wang
of Croplife China, an organisation representing
agricultural biotech firms, welcomes the news, and says that the
research programme could help make GM crops more acceptable to
Chinese farmers.
Liu
Xuehua, an associate professor of environment planning
at Tsinghua University, says that
while she is not opposed to GM technologies, policymaking in the
area should be more cautious and transparent.
‘Stakeholders, rather than scientists alone, should be involved
in the policy-making process concerning GM commercialisation so
that more potential risks can be identified,’ Liu says. ‘The
decision to commercialise them should not be based simply on the
fact that there is now big government funding for the area,’ she
adds.
© Royal Society of Chemistry 2008
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(4.33 out of 5)