
China is on a quest to ensure its food security and reduce its reliance on food imports. This has prompted a cautious embrace of a technology that its population has to date treated with deep mistrust: genetically-modified organisms.
On Christmas Day 2023, China issued licenses to 26 domestic companies to produce and distribute GM corn and soybean seeds, the latest move in a gradual liberalization that could dramatically enhance the country’s path to self-sufficiency.
This week, The Wire traces China’s path towards adopting GM technology and assesses GM’s role in ensuring China’s food security.
FIRST OF ITS KIND
December’s announcement marks the first time that Chinese companies have received government approval to produce and distribute GM seeds, and follows an earlier announcement in October certifying dozens of GM seed varieties for commercial production in China.
These moves come after extreme weather events made 2023 a difficult year for agriculture in China. In the first half of the year, about 1.86 million hectares were affected by adverse rainfall, or about eight percent of China’s wheat land — an area about three times the size of Delaware. For China, a country with 1.4 billion people to feed and only nine percent of the world’s arable land, it’s a major concern.
The general public in China has very significant anxieties and concerns and, in part, the government probably wanted it that way, because they worried about market takeovers from foreign seed companies.
Wendong Zhang, assistant professor at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University
The top three sources for Chinese imports of food as of 2021 were France, the United States and Brazil, according to the World Bank. Crop yield, referring to the amount of production generated relative to the area harvested, is a metric where China has underperformed by international standards. The corn yield in the U.S., where GM technology is in widespread use, has increased by 63 percent from 1991 to 2021. Over the same period, China’s corn yield is up by only 37 percent.

Chinese scientists are world leaders in agricultural gene editing with around 75 percent of the world’s patents, according to financial research firm S&P Global. But progress towards commercialization has been slow, due to public wariness over potential negative effects on human health after high-profile food safety scandals in China over the years. One 2022 study of social media messages about GM crops in China over a seven-year period found that more than 80 percent opposed adopting the technology.
“The general public in China has very significant anxieties and concerns and, in part, the government probably wanted it that way, because they worried about market takeovers from foreign seed companies,” says Wendong Zhang, assistant professor at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University.
Today, Chinese agriculture companies have the technology and R&D investment needed to compete with foreign multinationals on GM seed production if the regulatory environment continues to loosen.
“We see that many of the 26 companies who were granted licenses are provincial grain producers, but the list also includes Syngenta, who have the infrastructure to distribute GMO products around the world,” says Smyth from Jingpinou. “I doubt that this is the strategy for Syngenta crop production in 2024 or 2025, but it could well be the strategy for production by 2029 or 2030.”
In 2017, state-owned chemical company ChemChina acquired Swiss agribusiness company Syngenta for $43 billion, the largest overseas deal by a Chinese company to date.
Mindful of the risk of excessive reliance on imports, the Chinese government passed a new food security law in December emphasizing the importance of “basic self-sufficiency in grains.” Without addressing genetic modifications directly, the law makes several references to the role of new technologies in improving grain production and processing.

“China sees the significant risk to national security as elevated by the U.S.-China trade war and the concerns from the U.S. and the EU regarding technology transfers,” says Zhang from Cornell. “China has done a lot of investment in genome editing and other newer technologies where China is not as far behind compared to the traditional GM seeds development.”
The chart below shows some of the new technologies identified by investment bank Goldman Sachs as potentially significant contributors to China’s food security goals. The bank estimates that use of all these techniques could reduce China’s import reliance by as much as 80 percent.

Such estimates presume that China will continue its path towards widespread liberalization of GM technology. In 2023, the designated area for production of GM crops in China was still only 267,000 hectares, an area smaller in size than Rhode Island. Observers expect the government to continue at a cautious pace.
“The Chinese government could liberalize GMO production tomorrow morning and produce vast quantities of mutated crops. But they have chosen very deliberately not to do that,” says Smyth from Jingpinou. “It could take China all the way to meeting its food security goals, or not much further at all, depending on the constraints which the government puts on the scale of production.”

Aaron Mc Nicholas is a staff writer at The Wire based in Washington DC. He was previously based in Hong Kong, where he worked at Bloomberg and at Storyful, a news agency dedicated to verifying newsworthy social media content. He earned a Master of Arts in Asian Studies at Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Dublin City University in Ireland.