The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is already rippling through China’s economic and political system. One notable effect: A new threat to the country’s food security. Ukraine, sometimes referred to as the world’s bread basket, is a top supplier of corn and barley to China.
For Beijing, the current situation is further proof of the risks in relying on foreign countries to feed its enormous population, following on from the U.S.-China trade war and the hit to its imports of products like American-grown soybeans. As Xi Jinping said, “food security is an important foundation for national security.”
The government’s concerns are translating into a change in its attitude towards both genetically-edited and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), both of which are used around the world to improve crop yields. Beijing has long maintained very limiting policies towards GMOs, largely due to public opposition to the technology. But over the last year, regulators have begun loosening some of those restrictions.
“With the trade war between the U.S. and China, also because of climate change and different climate weather patterns, the central government sees that there is a need to increase domestic self-sufficiency as the main overarching goal of China’s food security strategy,” says Andrew Sim, a partner in Baker McKenzie’s Hong Kong office where he runs the firm’s global plant variety rights practice. “We are starting to see a bit of a relaxation towards GMO crops. There have been a flurry of policy announcements.”
That flurry includes China’s agriculture ministry in November declaring an overhaul of the rules surrounding GMOs to establish a clear path for products from approval to commercialization. A month later, the ministry announced plans to greenlight three domestically-developed GMO corn varieties. And in January, the government released streamlined guidelines for the approval of gene-edited crops. Gene-editing is less controversial than gene modification because it involves making a precise change to an organism’s DNA, rather than introducing an entirely foreign gene.
Even these small steps indicate an important shift in the government’s policy stance on GMOs. “They won’t be suddenly opening the market, they will gradually roll it out,” says Wendong Zhang, an economics professor at Iowa State University who studies Chinese agriculture. “They are already on the path: The gate has been opened.”
Chinese researchers, particularly in the field of gene-editing, are coming out of that gate running; they already collectively hold around 75 percent of agricultural gene-editing patents globally.
“China is quite advanced [in gene-editing] and the government is putting a lot of money into it,” says Gao Caixia, the principal investigator at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing and a prominent gene-editing researcher. In recent years, her lab has discovered methods to edit genes to eliminate mildew fungus in wheat, produce bacteria-resistant rice, and increase Vitamin C content in lettuce. “We are happy with the new rules,” she adds, referring to the streamlined approval process announced in January.
China was the first country to grow GMO crops commercially, starting with virus-resistant tobacco in the late 1980s. But in the intervening years, the government made a sharp U-turn, only allowing GMO cotton and papaya for commercial use, mostly due to public opposition. According to a 2018 study, over 40 percent of respondents in China opposed GMO food.
This widespread distrust stems from the myriad food safety scandals that have plagued China. “It is a demonized technology,” says Sam Geall, the executive director of China Dialogue who has conducted research on public opinion about GMOs in China. “Conditioned by years of horrific food safety scandals, starting with melamine milk, GMOs and food safety became bound up with one another, even if they are not the same.” Conspiracy theories abound on Chinese social media arguing that GMOs are a foreign plot, Geall adds; in the 2018 study, 13 percent of respondents said they believed that GMOs represent a form of bioterrorism against China.
Conditioned by years of horrific food safety scandals, starting with melamine milk, GMOs and food safety became bound up with one another, even if they are not the same.
Sam Geall, the executive director of China Dialogue
The stark reality of China’s declining agricultural capacity is a key factor behind the government’s change of heart. Already by 2018, the U.S. had five times more arable land per capita than China, according to World Bank data. Due to urban encroachment and environmental degradation, the amount of Chinese land suitable for crops is rapidly decreasing.
In turn, China’s dependence on overseas food has deepened; from 2011 to 2021, the value of agricultural imports surged by over 131 percent, according to Chinese official data, partly due to shifting consumption patterns among the country’s rising middle class. France, Australia, and the U.S. were the top three exporters of food products to China as of 2019, according to the World Bank: China’s relationship with the U.S. and Australia has significantly worsened in recent years.
“The calculus [around GMOs] is changing,” says Abigail Coplin, an assistant professor at Vassar College who researches GMOs in China. “It is shifting the risk-benefit analysis.”
The government will likely first pave the way for GMO feed crops produced for animals, like corn, before food crops for direct consumption, like rice, analysts say. China Dialogue’s Geall, though, cautions there may be a long wait before widespread commercialization of GMO crops, given lingering public opposition and disagreements within the government. China is not alone in its restrictive stance; many European countries, for example, still ban GMOs.
If China continues to loosen restrictions, some homegrown companies could benefit. While multinational giants like Dow Chemical Company and Bayer dominate the global GMO market, Chinese companies like Shenzhen-listed Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group and Nasdaq-listed Origin Agritech have invested heavily in R&D over the last decade. Gaining access to GMO technology was a major motivation behind state-owned ChemChina’s $43 billion acquisition of Syngenta, the Swiss agribusiness, in 2017 — the largest overseas deal by a Chinese company to date. The three Chinese companies either did not respond to requests or declined to comment for this article.
China’s desire for greater food security tallies with a broad shift in economic policy towards greater self-reliance, evidenced by the country’s efforts to build up its domestic semiconductor industry. The lessons of the U.S.’s moves against China’s telecoms infrastructure industry are also shaping the government’s response across several sectors, analysts say.
“The seed is the computer chip of the agriculture industry,” says Iowa State University’s Zhang. “They have seen what the U.S. can do through their action against Huawei. They want to shield themselves from that.”
Katrina Northrop is a journalist based in Washington D.C. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Providence Journal, and SupChina. @NorthropKatrina