Food security and self-sufficiency have long been high on the agenda of Chinese policy makers. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gives Beijing more reasons to focus on the issue. Weaning itself off imported foodstuffs would mean more investment into the biotechnology industry.
The country needs better technology to improve crop yields. That probably entails use of GM foods: China has been revamping its regulations on that in recent months. Scarce water, particularly in the north, is another intractable problem.
Improving agricultural productivity was probably the main rationale for state-owned chemical company ChemChina’s $43 billion acquisition in 2017 of Swiss seed and pesticide company Syngenta, which is in the process of an initial public offering in Shanghai. But the other heavyweight GMO companies are mostly American and European such as Monsanto, Dow, BASF and DuPont. China will hope to groom its own homemade champion, but that would take time and investment.
How to feed its 1.4 billion people in a more politically unstable world will increasingly become a key task for Beijing. But self-sufficiency is a tricky beast, as both the Sino-U.S. trade conflict and Russia’s current travails are demonstrating.