Agricultural Biotechnology in China Valerie J

Agricultural Biotechnology in China Valerie J. Karplus · Xing Wang Deng Agricultural Biotechnology in China Origins and Prospects Foreword by Norman E. Borlaug Valerie J. Karplus Xing Wang Deng Technology and Policy Program Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Developmental Biology 77 Massachusetts Ave. Yale University, P.O. Box 208104 Building E40-371 165 Prospect St., OML 352A Cambridge, MA 02139 New Haven, CT 06520-8104 [email protected] [email protected] ISBN: 978-0-387-71138-6 e-ISBN: 978-0-387-71139-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2007933078 c 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Cover illustration: Rural landscape near Guanping Village in central China’s Hunan province. Printed on acid-free paper. 987654321 springer.com For Guanping Village Note on Chinese Names Throughout the text, we spell Chinese names using the pinyin romanization system instead of the original Chinese characters. Using the mainland Chinese convention, we write the last name followed by first name, as in Deng Xiaoping. We make exceptions for scientists that are widely known outside of China by their Chinese or American first name followed by last name, for example, Dr. Ray Wu. In the Works Cited, sources are listed according to the format used in the original citation, usually by the author’s last name. Scope of Work This book is limited in scope to developments that occurred in mainland China, and mostly those occurring from 1949 to the present. Throughout the text, we use the name “China” to refer to the mainland only. Foreword China’s strong economic development of recent decades is built upon its successes in agriculture research and development over the past 50 years. From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, internal campaigns and upheaval dwarfed the achievements of many dedicated Chinese scientists. However, by the late 1970s the results of modern agricultural research really began to bear fruit. For the next 20 years, agricultural policies encouraged greater initiative, innovation, investment, efficiency, and risk- taking—all to the benefit of Chinese agriculture. Rapid expansion in the use of high- yielding modern varieties and chemical fertilizers, improved water management, and more effective weed, disease, and insect control practices all occurred during this period. Since the mid-1990s, however, China’s agricultural progress has slowed. Rural wages are now lagging significantly behind those in the cities. Rural-to-urban migra- tion is accelerating, and will likely involve over 200 million people by 2020. Man- aging this demographic change and keeping the agricultural economy and farmer incomes expanding are huge social and technological challenges that stand to affect Chinese and world history. China’s population is projected to grow to 1.6 billion by 2050. A larger and wealthier population is likely to double food, feed, and fiber demand by mid-century, while the arable land area is likely to fall by 20 percent, if not more because of urbanization, land degradation and water shortages. New agricultural science and technology—with greater national coordination of provincial and regional research organizations—will be critical to meeting these challenges. Far-reaching policy changes will also be needed in agricultural tax policy, land tenure, and farmer education. Karplus and Deng provide an excellent account of how recent developments in agricultural biotechnology in China may be the next big step in a long tradition of agricultural advances. I commend them for this outstanding piece of scholarship. Dr. Norman E. Borlaug Nobel Peace Prize Laureate ix Preface The path to Guanping, a remote mountain village in central China’s Hunan province, invites its travelers back in time. Over hills and valleys the elusive dirt track winds almost beyond the reach of China’s whirlwind economic development, arriving at clusters of wooden cottages that house around one hundred people. The surrounding terraced hillsides, reminiscent of images in ancient brush paintings, overflow with the year’s rice crop. One of the co-authors of this book, Xing Wang Deng, was born in this village, and as a boy followed the same path for miles to attend the closest elementary and middle schools. We followed well-worn footprints on a visit to China’s rice farming regions in the summer of 2005, tracing a path that has led ultimately to the authorship of this book. A closer look around Guanping revealed that even in its relative isolation, life in this typical rice planting village was changing rapidly. The figures that emerged to greet us were either the very old or the very young. Most of the young adult population had left for higher paying jobs in towns and cities, joining China’s growing migrant population. Rice paddies were sown with elite high-yielding hybrid varieties developed by leading breeders in the provincial capital. Grafted onto an otherwise isolated rural landscape were satellite dishes, a small dam nearby to supply electricity seasonally, fashion magazines, and bottles of carbonated soda, all signs of increasing linkages to the outside world. This brief glimpse of rural China masks deeper challenges facing the country’s farmers. Since its earliest days, agriculture has been inherently demanding on the environment. Only a modest fraction of China’s land is arable, and increasing land productivity has been part of the quest for survival over thousands of years. Today, as China’s population surpasses 1.3 billion and diets change to reflect growing pros- perity, this quest has never been more important. Especially over the last century, efforts to increase agricultural yields have taken a severe toll on the environment. Rising applications of pesticides, fertilizer, and irrigation have left soils polluted, salty, and depleted of nutrients, while straining limited water and energy resources. The creeks near Guanping village are almost silent and lifeless, lacking the fish and shrimp that were once abundant. High value fertile land is being lost to nonagri- cultural uses, such as commercial development. These trends cast doubt on China’s ability to provide an adequate, safe, and environmentally sustainable food supply to future generations. xi xii Preface A typical rural household in Guanping Village. Photo by authors. As part of efforts to address these challenges, China’s leaders are redoubling investment in science and technology programs. This emphasis on science and technology in China has deep historical roots. For thousands of years, leaders and farmers have relied on incremental advances in science and technology to overcome challenges facing the agricultural sector. The introduction of high-yielding crop varieties and associated inputs in the 1960s and 1970s increased land productivity and helped China to maintain food self-sufficiency through the early 1990s. In part due to the growing population and mounting environmental toll, the search is now on for new solutions. Agricultural biotechnology is one option that has emerged at the crossroads of the country’s high technology and agricultural development agendas. We wrote this book to explore how support for agricultural biotechnology has become a dominant theme in China’s agricultural research efforts, and how its development might affect the future of the country’s agriculture and food supply. China’s rapid advances in the development of transgenic crops, which contain yield-enhancing or other useful traits transferred in by a set of molecular techniques, have drawn the most widespread attention. Several years ago, in the wake of food safety scares and widespread uncertainty, transgenic technology was widely shunned, particularly in parts of Europe and industrialized East Asia. Few observers realized that more than five years before the conflict erupted, virus-resistant transgenic tobacco was being planted commercially in China. Although the transgenic tobacco has since been withdrawn from the market, research on a wide array of other crops is now underway. Meanwhile, the widespread application of non-transgenic Preface xiii techniques aimed at solving some of the country’s most persistent agricultural challenges has largely escaped public notice. While some stories of agricultural biotechnology in China have dominated headlines and others have not, we wrote this book to provide a more comprehensive picture of recent developments for citizens and policymakers, both in China and around the world. We hope this book will find an eager audience in university students beginning their careers in an age of rapid transformation, as well as policy practitioners and the curious public in China and abroad. The number of opportunities available for biologists and biotechnologists in China is growing at an unprecedented pace. These individuals will shape the future of the field in China and its international reputation. China’s agricultural biotechnology programs have been crafted with an eye to estab- lishing the country as a major contributor in international scientific circles, boosting economic competitiveness in world markets, and modernizing its agricultural sector. Achieving these goals will depend on whether or not the research enterprise and commercialization channels are effectively managed. This book explores these management challenges, and offers several guiding insights for the future of agricultural biotechnology in China.

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