“Our agricultural technology gap, particularly with the U.S., can’t be allowed to widen any further,” Deng Yan, Professor at the Guangdong Ocean University’s School of Management, said at a seed conference in Hainan in early April. “Otherwise, it would put China at greater risk of containment by the U.S.” “China’s high-end seed development capability is poor, and it’s a technological problem,” he added. China has nearly eight times more authorized domestic breeds of crop seeds than the U.S. and the Netherlands combined, with 7,323 breeds authorized domestically between 2010 and 2019, according to data compiled by Deng from the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants. “But in terms of international market share, China’s seed-competitiveness ranking quickly slipped from 1st to 15th,” he said. China’s seed exports only had a 1.51% share of the global market, compared with the Netherlands’ 20.47% and the U.S.’ 13.91%. “The U.S. has more than 2,000 seed patents from just one company, Cordova, while the total number of all patents in China combined is only 1,225, not to mention that over half of them come from a single state-owned enterprise, without which the figures would only get worse,” Deng said.
To address this problem, China needs to foster a mutually beneficial relationship between businesses and research institutes, Deng contends. But the lack of collaboration between companies and research institutes has disrupted the commercial seed industry. “In China, agricultural technology is certainly the forte of research institutes, and companies are less capable of solving seed-security issues,” Deng said.
China is the second-largest seed consumer in the world, behind the U.S., with the market potential estimated at more than CNY120 billion. It had a seed-trade deficit of USD350 million in 2021, according to a report released in October by Vcbeat, an agricultural technology platform in Beijing. The report added that despite an abundance of seed-related enterprises, China has relatively weak research and development (R&D) capabilities, less capital investment and weak copyright protection, while more than 90% of the scientific instruments that China uses for seed research are imported.
Despite China ranking first in the world for seed-patent applications, higher than the U.S. and Europe combined, loose collaboration between research institutions and companies has hindered the commercialization of its seeds, the report said. “China’s per capita farmland is relatively small, which requires us to increase grain yields through technological measures,” said Weng Ming, Researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Rural Development.
China is facing extra pressure from a dwindling young rural workforce due to urbanization and the continued sale of farmland by debt-ridden local governments, which further weighs on food security, he said. “Although we have seen many recent technological breakthroughs in China’s agricultural sector, the biggest hurdle remains their implementation in the countryside,” he said, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
