Genetically Modified Foods: China’s Gordian Knot?
by 22nd April 2016
OVER the past few decades, China’s meteoric rise as Asia’s premier economy has become the overriding framework that locals and international analysts alike use to explain the region. More rarely discussed, though, is how this rapid growth has brought with it the same issues of sustainability and food security that have long plagued economies shifting from an agricultural to an urban industrial base.
Unlike in India, another fast developing nation that has understood the importance advancing traditional industries like agriculture, China has become the world’s largest importer of rice. Therein lies the economic rub.
Beijing’s historic focus on manufacturing as key to commercial domination has ignored the important lessons learned by countries that industrialized in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the most critical of these is the inevitable migration of labor and the issue of feeding large, centralized populations involved in non-agrarian activities.
An oft-repeated trope states that China has one-fifth of the world’s population, but only seven percent of the world’s arable land, making food security a national obsession. While imported grain ensures there is no immediate threat to the food supply, any step away from self-sufficiency is an ideological blow beneath the belt for Beijing; China’s government has been committed to sustaining a domestic surplus since Chairman Mao’s mishandling of the economy left millions dead from starvation.
As it stands, China still relies on small family holdings to produce much of its food, although it has become patently obvious this traditional model cannot sustainably feed 1.3 billion people. The disconnect is further compounded when those smallholders – upon whom China’s food production depends – move in ever increasing numbers to better paid jobs in the cities. Alongside these issues, China’s manufacturing base is also to blame for pollution and a debilitating impact on land fertility. With intensive damming cutting into the availability of fish as a cheap and plentiful protein source, things look bleak for China’s ability to feed itself.
The government is now asking whether the family-based farming model is up to the task. One alternative would be the system of industrial farms preferred in the U.S., whereby the government instigates non-ownership land acquisitions to create larger and more efficient yields. Another is to continue with smaller landholdings but seek increased productivity through technology, as was done in Japan.
While state policy has favored the smallholding option to date, increasing the food supply from fixed arable areas is a difficult task and entails resorting to agrochemicals and genetically modified crops (GMOs). The Chinese public, however, is massively opposed to GMOs. These fears have been stoked by the People’s Liberation Army’s strategic worries over American imperialism and media speculation on the long-term ill effects widespread GMO consumption might have on public health.
Even if those fears have not been confirmed by scientific data, public sentiment is so overwhelming that it has forced the Communist Party’s hand, one of just a handful of cases where popular pressure has successfully altered CCP policy. As things currently stand, China allows only the import of GMO grains used for animal feed. Human consumption is strictly forbidden.
Or is it?
The Chinese public has long maintained a strongly held belief that GMOs are already widely used in Chinese food. These suspicions were recently confirmed in investigations conducted by Greenpeace. In the Liaoning region – a major part of China’s “breadbasket” – Greenpeace’s discovery of significant proportions of illegal GMO strains have caused considerable concern.
The group’s findings come in tandem with revelations that Chinese nationals have been stealing GMO crop seeds from the U.S., especially in the state of Iowa, to send back to China for research purposes. These seeds are uniformly patented to protect the expensive research investments that go into their development, but China seems determined to skip the costly process of original research.
If seed theft in Iowa reflects small-scale industrial espionage, the planned US$43 billion merger of state-owned ChemChina and Swiss agrochemicals and seeds company Syngenta marks a shift to far larger market acquisitions. Were the ChemChina-Syngenta deal finalized, the group would become the largest agribusiness firm in the world – by a wide margin.
Most importantly for China, ChemChina would gain proprietary information on around 7,000 varieties of GMO seed types, allowing it to skip the equivalent of around eight years of research that would cost an estimated $1.5 billion in costs per annum. If purchasing Syngenta was an attempt to win over the Chinese public, however, Beijing likely miscalculated the mood. Chinese activists havepublicly opposed the merger in an exceedingly rare rebuke of state priorities. U.S. lawmakers and regulators are also threatening to derail the deal, with a group of senators warning that a Chinese-owned Syngenta could threaten US food security. The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) is currently reviewing the proposal.
In its attempt to undo the Gordian knot of a growing populace and limited food production, China’s economic planners and agricultural officials seem to have committed to GMOs as the best way out of their predicament. This decision, however, has been taken without the prior knowledge or agreement of a vehemently opposed public. With the economy already in decline, any policies that lead to damaging strikes or protests may prove unwise. By trying to cut through this knot with such a divisive solution, China’s political leaders may well find their blade of choice is double-edged.
