China says it has made big strides in revitalising a seed industry that has come under heavy scrutiny in recent years while remaining reliant on more advanced Western sources, amid a nationwide push to boost self-reliance in the sector.
With 1.4 billion mouths to feed, China has ramped up food-security measures against the backdrop of tensions with trading partners such as the United States.
Agricultural authorities now say scientists are cataloguing samples – collected from a three-year nationwide survey on agricultural germplasm – and storing them in multiple seed banks that are believed to be adequate for utilisation for at least three decades, state mouthpiece CCTV reported on Monday, quoting officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
Calling it a “historic breakthrough”, CCTV said China was “gradually getting rid of its dependence on imported seed sources”.
The report came six months after a candid assessment by the ministry’s China Seed Association warned that China’s seed industry was at least a generation behind Western giants in terms of technology. The industry has also been accused by agricultural experts of lacking competition while being uncreative and fragmented, impeding the push to reduce reliance on imported seeds.
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Accelerating innovation in the seed industry was also among the stated goals at a national rural work conference in December, when the ministry said China’s self-reliance rate in seeds had increased from 70 to 75 per cent since a seed-industry-revitalisation plan was launched in 2021.
It was unclear how much the rate has improved this year, but CCTV said there had been an acceleration in planting a series of new soybean and corn varieties, which China has depended on the global market for. It also pointed to rising market shares of domestically developed chicken and shrimp as evidence of agricultural advancements.
During the survey that began in 2021 and was completed earlier this year, about 139,000 new samples of crop-germplasm resources and 1.19 million new samples of livestock and aquatic genetic materials were collected, the report said. Coupled with the existing preserved resources, the report said China now has the world’s largest collection of agricultural genetic resources, without specifying the total.
A national bank of crop germplasm resources and another of marine fishery germplasm are now fully operational, while a new livestock and poultry germplasm resource bank and another for freshwater fishery germplasm will be established next year, said Yang Haisheng, deputy head of the ministry’s seed management department.
“China’s strategic conservation capacity for agricultural germplasm resources will thereby be enhanced to meet development needs in the next 30 to 50 years,” he was quoted as saying.
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Domestically raised white-feather broiler chickens and Pacific white shrimp had respectively captured more than 25 and 35 per cent of their markets by the end of June, gradually reducing the nation’s reliance on those imports, the report said.
Chicken is China’s second-most-consumed meat, after pork. The nation had developed a domestic broiler breed in the 1990s, but it was wiped out by bird flu in 2004, reinforcing the need for imports.
China is also promoting a number of high-oil and high-yield soybean varieties, machine-harvested corn, and new salt-alkali-resistant crops developed by domestic firms.
A total of 270 national seed enterprises have received financial incentives from the government since 2021 to enhance their breeding abilities, and CCTV said they now cultivate more than 60 per cent of newly approved national varieties.
The sector, which used to be plagued by counterfeit and substandard products, has become “cleaner” after authorities started a tough crackdown three years ago as part of the initiative, with seed-related legal cases declining annually, CCTV said.
