February 15, 2006

 

China to study GM crops and invest in bio-safety

 

 

China has outlined plans to find wider applications for agricultural biotechnology in the next five years, the country stated in its 11th Five-Year Development Programme released to the People's Daily.

 

The strategy includes efforts to develop GM crops to provide increased insect resistance, salt and drought tolerance, anti-herbicide and anti-crop disease traits

 

At the same time, investments in safety monitoring will be increased. The strategy stipulates that a more comprehensive and accurate safety evaluation is required before the full commercialisation of GM crops.

 

Agricultural biotechnology is the field in which Chinese research is nearly on par with its US counterpart, according to Zhu Zhen, a leading rice scientist and deputy director of the Bureau of Life Science and Biotechnology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

According to the China Bio-Industrial Report, the Ministry of Agriculture had approved 585 GM plant experiments, including 154 environmental releases and 48 pre-production trials since 2003.

 

Commercialisation of GM cotton, tomatoes, pimientos (Spanish pepper) and a species of morning glory were approved as early as the 1990s and today more than two thirds of China's cotton is of the GM variety.

 

However, China has remained deeply suspicious of GM crops.

 

Last year, the government reshuffled the State Agricultural GM Crop Bio-safety Committee which decides the commercialisation of GM planting in China. Agricultural biotechnology scientists who had dominated the committee were replaced by bio-safety and environmental scientists.

 

Plans were also made to establish local GM plant safety evaluation bases in cities and provinces while bio-safety evaluation laboratories will be segregated from laboratories doing GM research.  One such bio-safety evaluation base was set up in late 2005 in Shanghai.

 

More money will also be spent on improving the equipment for GM crop testing so scientists can study the effects of GM crops on the general environment and prevent GM strains from leaking out into conventional fields.