China’s ruling Communist Party faces rising popular opposition to GMOs. As in any other nation, there are a variety of views within China about whether it’s safe to eat food made with genetically engineered ingredients. But Chinese citizens have lately witnessed a number of major food safety scandals, including a 2008 disaster in which melamine-tainted milk products killed six babies or toddlers, sending 54,000 more to the hospital, and a 2010 revelation that some cooking oil sold to consumers had been recovered from drains and probably contained carcinogens.
Against this backdrop, otherwise implausible-sounding claims from a vocal minority of GMO critics (such as an assertion that GMO soybean oil was associated with a higher incidence of tumors) gain traction in the country’s social media, which many Chinese favor over official state media as a source of news.
Recent informal opinion surveys in Chinese social media suggest that large majorities believe GMOs are harmful, and scientific surveys also indicate that opposition is significant. An academic survey this year found that roughly one-third of respondents opposed GMOs outright and another 39 percent worried about them—a stark difference from earlier government surveys. Such opposition is often tinged with nationalism.
A Chinese general decreed earlier this year that no GMO ingredients, not even a little oil, should be allowed in soldiers’ food. So for now, anyway, the government is holding back on approving new GMOs for food crops. Today no genetically modified food (with the exception of a virus-resistant papaya) is grown in China, even for animal feed.
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Yet despite the uncertainties, research on GMO crops continues. By one count published in Nature Biotechnology, 378 Chinese groups employing thousands of scientists are engaged in this work. The government will have spent some $4 billion on GMOs by 2020. Researchers are using the latest modification technologies and drawing from high-throughput genomic analysis of thousands of crop strains, accelerating the pace of discovery.
Cautious though they are of arousing public opposition, Chinese leaders are well aware that their country will need a lot more food. Growing it will require new agricultural tricks. … In anticipation, the nation is building a storehouse of genetically modified crop strains for future use. China sees this as a way of protecting its long-term security. In fact, the country is the world’s top public spender on genomics and genetic modification of crops.
Read full, original article: China’s GMO Stockpile
