Seed industry needs more reform
Print Edition
China will encourage technological innovation to boost domestic supplies of high-quality seeds, dubbed “agriculture’s microchips,” officials said at a seed industry convention.
Despite years of bumper harvests, experts and officials warn against China’s over-reliance on foreign seeds for a variety of crops, an underbelly of the campaign to secure food security in the world’s most populous nation.
China will speed up the revision of its seed laws and regulations on protecting new plant species to foster innovation, Vice Agriculture Minister Zhang Taolin told the 2021 China Seed Congress and Nanfan Agricultural Silicon Valley Forum.
The country will enhance intellectual property rights protection to protect innovators in the industry, Zhang said at the event in the city of Sanya, south China’s Hainan Province, home to a national seed breeding base.
Echoing Zhang’s call, He Xiaorong, vice president of the Supreme People’s Court, pledged to beef up IPR judicial protection involving new plant species.
The vice minister said China will allow its market to become a vital driving force in germplasm innovation — living tissue from which new plants can be grown — and nurture both leading enterprises in the field and specialized, innovative small and medium-sized firms.
Multinationals have become the main body of investment and technological innovation in the global seed industry, said Wan Jianmin, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
But in China, innovation in this field still stems mostly from research institutes, colleges and universities, Wan said.
China has had 17 consecutive years of bumper harvests in grain production, with grain output exceeding 650 billion kilograms for six years in a row.
But grain supply and demand remain in a “tight balance,” and the country still faces many weak links in germplasm resource protection and breeding technologies, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
Significant progress
While rice and wheat seeds have achieved self-sufficiency, agriculturists said certain corn and vegetable varieties still heavily rely on more expensive foreign seeds.
“The price of white turnip seeds from the Republic of Korea, for instance, is over 20 times that of the domestic ones, but their turnips still win over the market with better appearance and juicier texture,” said Liu Pengkui, an official with the Hunan Agriculture Department.
Wan said China has seen significant progress in basic research involving germplasm in recent years as scientists have completed sequencing or resequencing of a variety of key agricultural crops, and the country’s genome research on rice and wheat is among the top in the world.
Yet the seed industry still faces a lack of originality in basic research, cutting-edge and core technologies, Wan said, stressing an urgent need to improve corporate innovation.
China has more than 5,000 seed companies, but they are mainly small in scale and weak in innovation. Combined R&D investments in 2018 were much less than that of US agrochemical giant Monsanto, he added.
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