Every year after the New Year, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issues an “important document”, and it is usually on the same topic, which is about agriculture, rural areas and farmers. This document is known as Document No. 1.
On Feb. 21, the CPC released this year’s No. 1 document, which is also about China’s agriculture. However, unlike in the past, this year’s No. 1 document has a focus not usually found in the past, and that is the issue of seeds in agriculture. The development of the seed industry, for the first Time in the No. 1 document was mentioned separately, requiring the seed industry to fight a good “turnaround”. Is to turn the seed industry into a world leader.
Last December, the central economic work conference held in Beijing, Xi Jinping has stressed the need to “carry out seeds ‘neck’ technology research”. It seems that seeds, indeed, have become a major dilemma for Chinese agriculture.
On February 22, China’s State Council held a press conference, Vice Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Zhang Taolin said, “In general, the safety of China’s agricultural seeds is guaranteed, and the risks are controllable.”
This statement is a bit different from the No. 1 document and Xi Jinping’s statement. Is Xi exaggerating the seed problem, or are CCP officials hiding the truth?
According to the “2019 China Crop Seed Import and Export Trade Information Analysis” released by the China Seed Trade Association (CNSTA), from 2014 to 2019, seed imports were 66,000 tons and exports were 25,100 tons, with China’s dependence on “foreign seeds” reaching 72 percent.
The Daily Economic News quoted the head of a seed enterprise in Guangdong Province: In addition to rice we are the world’s first, other seeds are more or less “neck” situation; seed quality is difficult to get. In particular, the problem of agricultural seeds is not only in the grain industry, but also in livestock and poultry.
According to public reports in the land media, China’s self-sufficiency rate in corn breeding is the weakest. Take the northeast and the Yellow Huaihai region, the main grain producing areas of China, for example, the corn grown in the Yellow Huaihai region is mainly the American Pioneer “Centaur 355” variety, and the corn seeds grown in the northern northeast are mainly imported from Germany, with Centaur 335 as the representative of the “foreign seeds “, once occupied 70% of the corn seed market in Jilin Province.
The dependence of vegetable seeds on foreign countries is even more serious. This is quite confusing.
According to the China Seed Trade Association, China imported $224 million of vegetable seeds in 2019, accounting for more than half of the total crop seed imports ($435 million). That is, “foreign seeds” basically cover all varieties, the market share of the top 10 local seed companies is only 15%.
The “hometown of China’s potatoes” known as Keshan County, Qiqihar City, Heilongjiang Province, in recent years, most of the potatoes planted are from the United States “Atlantic”, planting an area of 30,000 acres, accounting for half of the county’s planting area. And in the “hometown of Chinese vegetables” Shandong Shouguang, the share of foreign seeds was once as high as 80%, and there are still as much as 30%.
China’s 1.4 billion people usually eat white radish, most of the seeds are imported from South Korea, the essential pepper, from Israel. Beet and rye grass seeds have a foreign dependence of more than 95%. Broccoli domestic seeds accounted for only 5%, most from Japan.
Russia’s sunflower and rapeseed seeds, estimated to account for 50% of the Chinese market. Russia has significantly increased the export tariff rate for sunflower and rapeseed from January this year to 30% from 6.5% previously, causing some companies to be in trouble.
Also, there are pigs. In the eyes of Chinese pig farmers, pig breeding is the “microchip of pigs”, and many of China’s original breeding pigs are imported; before 1994, local pigs occupied more than 90% of China’s market share, but by 2007, this figure had fallen to 2%.
At present, Chinese pigs are mainly the so-called “Duroc” imported from abroad, including Duroc from the United States, Long White from Denmark and York from the United Kingdom.
According to “Brake Agricultural Data”, in 2020, the total import of Chinese breeding pigs will exceed 20,000, a record high. Some people say that the annual average size of Chinese breeding pigs is 10 million, and 20,000 imported breeding pigs are not worth mentioning, but experts say that the key issue is the quality of breeding stock, not the quantity.
As far as the Chinese pig industry chain is concerned, the purebred pigs imported from abroad are the “grandparent” or “great-grandparent” of the pork sold in the market, and the imported breeding pigs are mainly used to renew the core herd.
If we encounter the impact of African swine fever like in 2019, it will cause the “reunion” of 4 generations of breeding pigs, which means that the number of breeding pigs will be in short supply for at least 4 years, and if the foreign embargo on breeding pigs is imposed on China at this time, the impact will be very huge. And every generation of breeding pigs needs time. Chinese experts believe that “pig chips” are more difficult than semiconductor chips.
Han Changfu, the outgoing Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs at the end of 2020, said that China’s ancestral chickens are almost entirely imported, and Xu Kuangdi, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2014, said that 99% of Peking ducks are now British Cherry Valley duck.
Understanding the seed dilemma of Chinese agriculture, to understand why Xi Jinping stressed the seed issue, to understand why the CPC Central Committee’s No. 1 document this year, will place special emphasis on seeds.
It is ironic to say that Chinese civilization, which relies on agriculture and has always claimed to be an agricultural power, has fallen into a seed dilemma.
The seed dilemma, which on the surface is actually not a big problem, just needing to buy more seeds, could actually pose a serious impact on China, especially on the CCP’s so-called great power rise strategy.
In 2020, China imported a record amount of Food from foreign countries, indicating that China’s own food production is no longer enough to meet its own needs. This is an inevitable trend; China is a country with a relatively small amount of arable land per capita, and although the country has a large area, two-thirds of it is high mountains and deserts, with roughly one-third of the arable range. Therefore, China needs high unit yields to maintain its indigenous food supply. Previously, China relied mainly on intensive farming on Family farms, which required a large labor input. But with industrialization and the shift of labor to urban industrial zones, the lack of rural labor has made intensive farming untenable.
The next option is to rely on advanced seeds. Take the example of soybeans, which China imports the most. China’s soybean production is only 60% of that of the United States, and the reason is the seeds. Simply put, Monsanto’s genetically modified soybean seeds in the U.S. have the property of resisting herbicides, eliminating weeds by spraying them with airplanes whenever weeds grow wild, while the soybeans can continue to grow.
Northeast China is dependent on GM soybean seeds for this very reason.
China still restricts other GMO seeds, such as rice and wheat, but may have to change its policy as well if food shortages become severe.
But the problem with seeds goes beyond that.
China’s rice seeds are currently claimed to be a world leader because China has bred its own hybrid rice varieties. But hybrid rice, after two years, degrades, so new seeds must be provided. This is the same as the case of genetically modified soybeans, where new seeds have to be bought every year. But this actually hides a crisis. What if the seed supply chain breaks down?
Chinese history has major political and social crises every two or three hundred years, but the reason the foundation of the Chinese economy is usually not completely destroyed is the small-peasant economy. To put it simply, each rural village has its own seeds, and each year after the grain harvest, the farmers choose the particularly good ones to leave as seeds. So the seeds are self-produced. Everywhere else the sky falls, the local countryside can continue their production and livelihood.
But if the seeds are centrally supplied and the farmers themselves don’t have their own seeds, they will be in trouble when the same full-scale crisis occurs, and the chain reaction is terrible. Whereas before it was hierarchical, with each small unit being self-sufficient and autonomous, now it is centrally controlled, with everyone tethered to one big chain to maintain balance and stability, and once the center gets out of control, it’s all over. So the seed crisis that the CCP is now facing may involve the survival of the entire race.
China’s hybrid rice was once exported to some countries in Southeast Asia, but was later stopped by the government for this very reason. Because of the high yield of hybrid rice, it would exclude other local varieties, and eventually local seeds were not available, and seeds of hybrid rice had to be purchased every year. In the event of any accidents, such as war, or bad relations between countries, what about local farmers?
This is actually the seed problem that China is facing now.
The solution to this problem is to master the seed technology themselves. So why can’t China cultivate good seeds by itself?
The official media Xinhua News Agency’s “Half Moon Talk” analysis said that domestic seeds are stuck, mainly “stuck” in the following five areas: – original germplasm is relatively rare.
–Original germplasm is relatively scarce. For example, maize, China’s maize germplasm resources innate advantage is insufficient, with the promotion of maize varieties, seed degradation is serious. Only with abundant germplasm resources can we produce more new varieties that the market needs.
— Weak capacity for accurate identification of resources. Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences Vice President Wan Jianmin introduced that China established the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Crop Germplasm Resources Conservation and Utilization Center, the total number of preserved resources exceeded 520,000, ranking second in the world, but currently less than 15,000 completed the accurate identification of resources.
— The existing germplasm resources are not sufficiently protected. According to the preliminary survey of the third national crop germplasm resources census (implementation period from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2020), in 375 counties in six provinces and regions, including Hubei, Hunan and Guangxi, 71.8% of local varieties of food crops disappeared, including many varieties with high-quality, disease-resistant and barren-tolerant characteristics, and germplasm resources protection faced new challenges.
— Weak gene mining ability. Chinese researchers have done some work, but there is still room for improvement in the “excavation of truly useful genes”, and there are still relatively few groundbreaking seeds created.
–The international seed industry has long entered the stage of molecular breeding and factory breeding, but China still mainly relies on conventional breeding methods, by eye and by hand. Molecular marker development and assisted selection, interspecific hybridization and embryo rescue, anther Culture and genetic transformation, gene editing and molecular breeding and other technology applications less.
This is the official statement. I would like to add that there is little input, no intellectual property rights, and insufficient profit sharing of scientific and technological achievements.
China’s seed research institutions and seed companies are state-run enterprises with little profit to speak of. The CCP has invested very little in seed R&D. The most powerful biotech talents in the CCP are working on viruses, human genetics, some kind of super soldier, or virus research, etc., because of the massive official investment in this area. There is very little investment in seed R&D.
Also, once something new comes out of seed technology, the property rights all belong to the government. For example, Yuan Longping, the father of hybrid rice in China, has not been helped much financially, although the Communist Party has given him high honors in recent years. This problem is very similar to the situation encountered in other technology industries.
One of the approaches China is now taking, and probably one we are very familiar with, is to steal and cheat from foreign countries. For example, more than 70% of Taiwan‘s vegetable and fruit seeds are said to have been transferred to mainland China. Similarly, China has never stopped stealing seeds from the U.S., Japan, etc., and has even been caught red-handed while stealing from the ground. But as the world becomes increasingly wary of Communist China’s theft of technology, this Chinese method, too, may be less and less effective.
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