Will China Make Its Peace With GMOs?

With 20% of the world’s population, and less than 10% of its arable land, China has long relied on imports to feed its people. These days, the government is increasingly fearful that this dependence is leaving the country vulnerable to major agricultural exporters, especially the U.S. Could genetically modified organisms finally be the answer?

Although GMOs have gained widespread acceptance elsewhere in recent years, Chinese consumers remain deeply opposed to them, and the government has delayed approvals of such crops for decades to avoid a backlash. That may be about to change. Earlier this month, the agriculture ministry laid the groundwork for growing genetically modified soybeans, and grains such as rice and corn, on Chinese soil for the first time. The question is whether the public will trust the government enough to accept such a revolution.

For as long as humans have been raising food, they’ve been selectively altering genes. Historically, that meant crossbreeding plants and animals with desirable traits to create organisms with more economic and nutritional value. China was an early innovator: Written records of Chinese crop science, including instructions on crossbreeding, date back 2,000 years.

By the 1970s, biotechnology had advanced enough that crop scientists no longer had to struggle with crossbreeding plants. Instead, they could simply insert a gene into a cell. In 1988, China became the first country to commercialize a GM crop when it approved a strain of virus-resistant tobacco. But problems loomed. In the early 1990s, China National Tobacco Corp. planned to launch a cigarette made with GM tobacco named “Gene.” When smokers objected, the name was changed to “China.” The rebranded product never hit the market either, and China’s genetically modified tobacco was removed from commercial cultivation entirely in 1995.

Elsewhere, opposition to GMOs has eased as consumers have accepted years of accumulating data showing that they’re safe to consume. In 1994, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration licensed a genetically modified tomato for commercial sale. It was the first such approval anywhere in the world, and other crops soon followed. By 2020, 90% of the corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. were genetically modified.

China took a very different route. Since the 1980s, nationwide food-safety scandals have flared regularly. Some have achieved international notoriety, including a 2008 incident in which 300,000 children were sickened by contaminated milk. Even for those Chinese open to the benefits of GMOs, the scandals called into question the government’s competence when it came to regulating food safety. In 2018, a peer-reviewed survey found that only 12% of Chinese consumers had a positive view of GMOs; perhaps unsurprisingly, the government was not found to be a credible source of information on the topic.

Wary of this resistance, Chinese officials have only approved the commercial cultivation of genetically modified cotton and papaya. Other crops remain in the lab or are exported for cultivation. One result is that China has only become more dependent on foreign GMOs, which are permitted for import so long as they’re processed into products like animal feed to support China’s surging demand for pork and other proteins.

That dependence has worried Chinese leaders for at least a decade. In 2013, President Xi Jinping called for rice bowls to be filled “primarily” with Chinese grains. This March, a new Five Year Plan enshrined “food security” as a policy priority. The goal is to achieve "self-reliance," a term that China began using after the U.S. choked off semiconductor exports to Huawei Technologies Co. Tellingly, Chinese officials and media have recently referred to GM seeds as the “new semiconductors” — and warned that China is vulnerable without the ability to cultivate its own.

So far, the government has moved more slowly on GMOs than on chips. But it seems all but inevitable that a significant new push is on the way. The Chinese people may just have to eat the decision, whether they like it or not.