China: As officials allow more GMOs, the public’s anti-GMO voices grow louder

China’s fierce public debate on genetically modified food, long a political hot potato in a country obsessed with how to feed its 1.3 billion citizens, has become the subject of a spat between big guns from two of its most powerful governing institutions.

Two weeks ago, a major-general in the People’s Liberation Army took to a popular newspaper to publish (in Chinese) a series of pointed rhetorical questions about Beijing’s policy allowing more trade in genetically modified grains, suggesting that genetically modified organisms, or GMO, are a strategy by which a Western conspiracy to supplant China’s food security is taking shape. GMOs are organisms that have had their genetic blueprint artificially re-engineered; for example, crops altered to become bug-resistant.

Read the full, original story here: “It’s China vs. China in GMO food fight”

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Additional Resources:

• “China approves genetically modified Argentine corn shipment,” Reuters
• “China’s Genetically Modified Food Fight,” Wall Street Journal