Quality seeds strengthen food security

Inspection of industry notes better production and self-sufficiency

A law-enforcement inspection into the nation's development of its own quality crop seeds by China's top legislature has highlighted growing self-sufficiency while revealing persistent hurdles like weak intellectual property protection and a lack of innovation of breeding methods.

The 24-strong inspection task force led by Zhao Leji, chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, found that the market value of the Chinese seed industry has topped 130 billion yuan ($18.2 billion) on the back of a national drive to empower the sector and strengthen national food security.

While addressing a legislative session on Tuesday in Beijing, he said the adoption of quality seeds in agricultural production is now contributing to 45 percent of the increases in grain yields.

"We've managed to use homegrown seeds for major food crops in China," he said while briefing lawmakers on the major findings of the inquiry, which was conducted from May to November in major food-producing areas including Heilongjiang, Hunan and Sichuan provinces to see the outcomes of the Seed Law. The law came into effect in March as China sought to break the West's monopoly on critical seeds and animal species.

Zhao said China's storage capacity for germ plasm — the genetic resources crucial to breeding research — is enough for China's strategic needs for the next half century, a conclusion reached by the task force after visiting major plasm banks built in recent years to conserve crop biodiversity threatened by climate change.

He listed a number of highlights in agricultural technology advancement. Those include the nationwide adoption of enhanced rice, wheat and corn varieties, the rollout of two homegrown gene-editing tools and improved research prowess of seed companies, whose investment in research and development more than doubled between 2015 and last year to 6 billion yuan.

"The inquiry found that the state of our seed sector is generally secure, and the enforcement of the Seed Law has forcefully bolstered the seed industry," he said.

However, Zhao noted that there's still a shortfall in terms of technological independence and self-reliance on quality seed supply.

He said that despite better preservation of germ plasm resources, the efforts to use such assets are still lagging. There's an overreliance on crossbreeding to enhance existing crop varieties, yet the application of next-generation techniques such as gene editing and artificial intelligence is insufficient.

Despite the explosive growth of seed companies since 2016, many lack research capabilities. The situation — coupled with the lack of knowledge transfer between companies and research — has hampered progress toward a market-oriented breeding environment, Zhao said, citing the example of Gansu province, where 85 percent of seed companies operate by conducting trial planting of new food varieties developed by their clients rather than designing them on their own. "Most companies are unable to conduct R&D," he said.

He also reiterated China's commitment to the protection of intellectual property for corporate breeders, who are still grappling with lengthy and costly legal procedures to seek compensation when their interests are jeopardized.

Understaffed law enforcement is also creating problems for cracking down on shoddy seeds, which often avoid oversight as a lot of the trade has moved to more covert sales channels online.

Zhao pledged better corporate access to funding, talent and technology support, and an increased clamp down on online sales of sub-quality seeds.