March 9, 2012

Chinese seed firms begin corn-breeding venture

The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and eight backbone Chinese seed companies made a deal on Tuesday (Mar 6) to set up a joint project (JV) aimed for commercialised corn breeding.

The new JV will build a platform for cooperation between scientific research institutions and seed companies to foster high-quality strains with proprietary intellectual property rights and raise the unit yield of corn crops.

Li Jiayang, vice minister of Agriculture and head of the CAAS, said the JV would explore a new model of commercialised breeding suitable for China's actual situations and would work to enhance the domestic seed industry's competitiveness.

Currently, China's seed industry is still in the early stages of development, and still has plenty of room for improvement in terms of companies' technical innovation ability, industrial concentration, and market competitiveness, according to Li.

Corn has the biggest planting area among all China's major grain crops. China's corn output reached 191.75 million tonnes in 2011, a jump of 8.2% over last year. The country imported a total of 1.75 million tonnes of corn last year, up 11.47% over the previous year.