China is fast becoming a global leader in developing genetically modified crops and may soon overtake the United States in public spending on plant biotechnology research, according to the first comprehensive assessment of biotechnology in the world's most populous nation.

Through July 2000, the China Office of Genetic Engineering Safety Administration approved a total of 251 biotech plants, animals and microorganisms for laboratory trials, environmental releases or commercialization, the study found.

Of those, 31 were plants approved for commercial sale. By comparison, regulatory agencies in the United States had signed off on 51 biotech crops as of July 2001.

"They've produced an entire array of crops that the rest of the world isn't working on ... things that are harder for private companies to capture returns on," said Scott Rozelle, a professor of agriculture and resource economics at the University of California, Davis.

Plants in China's biotech pipeline include rice, wheat, peanuts, tobacco, cabbage, sweet peppers, chili and petunias. Most are engineered to be resistant to disease, insects or herbicides.

Rozelle conducted the survey with colleagues in China and at Rutgers University. The results are being published today in the journal Science.

The researchers found that China has been spending $100 million a year on plant biotechnology, and reported that officials plan to boost research budgets to the equivalent of a half-billion dollars a year by 2005.

Worldwide, an estimated $3 billion is spent on research and development of genetically modified plants, Rozelle said. Of that, $2 billion is spent by the private sector and $1 billion by governments. Of the public spending, the U.S. share is estimated at less than half a billion dollars.

The risks and benefits of genetically modified crops -- to the environment, and to the health of consumers and growers -- are hotly debated around the world. Accordingly, the findings about China's biotech investment program are being interpreted in sharply different ways.

"It is very worrisome news," said Ignatio Chapela, an assistant professor of microbial ecology at UC Berkeley. Chapela reported in November finding contamination by biotech genes of native corn in rural Mexico. "I think it is not right to have that many products released in the environment because they are not going to stay put in China," Chapela said. "They are a major liability for the world."

Martina Newell-McGloughlin, head of biotechnology programs at UC Davis and for the UC system, greeted the findings with far more warmth.

"I think this is a very important illustration of how all things in life are relative," she said. "This technology is being adopted by those in real need in a real world as opposed to those of us in an affluent society who have the luxury (of) having theoretical concerns in a vacuum in an ideal world."

Still others said the survey shows that China is actually more cautious than they expected about adopting biotechnology.

Margaret Mellon, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Food and Environment Program, said rumors had been swirling that Chinese farmers were planting vast acreages with a variety of biotech crops.

Rozelle said about 1 million acres in China are planted with biotech crops, compared with more than 50 million acres in the United States, here mostly corn and soybean

The predominant genetically modified crop planted in China is a cotton that produces its own pesticide -- Bt, the same pesticide engineered into corn, cotton and other crops in the United States. Bt cotton varieties in China account for more than 20 of the 31 products approved for sale.

Aside from cottonseed oil, cotton is not a food source, and that suggests to Doreen Stabinsky that China is moving carefully.

"While this (study) makes it sound like they're going whole hog into genetic engineering, the subtext is that they haven't gone a whole lot into food," said Stabinsky, a former environmental studies professor at California State University, Sacramento, now working as a science adviser to Greenpeace, which opposes genetically engineering foods.

Rozelle said Chinese consumers by and large are ignorant of the genetic manipulation happening in food crops, similar to the American public a few years ago.

The researchers' findings, which began to be aired publicly in China last summer, have stimulated great debate there, he said, with calls for both more regulation and more experimentation.

"When you talk to intellectuals, people in the universities," Rozelle added, "they say, 'I'd rather not have it in my diet.' "

He said farmers of Bt cotton, for their part, reported improved health from not having to apply chemical pesticides, which Rozelle said generally are used in far greater volume and with fewer safety precautions in China than in the United States.

The popularity in China of Bt cotton in particular worries both opponents and advocates of agricultural biotechnology because the more pesticide that is present in the environment -- whether sprayed on or built into the plant's makeup -- the more quickly insects will evolve to become resistant.

However, because China, which this year joined the World Trade Organization, wants to play on the world market, it will have to grapple with international consumer resistance to genetically modified foods, Rozelle said.

China, however, hasn't been uncritical of bioengineered crops. Last year, it expressed concern about a proposed patent by biotech giant Monsanto on genetic blueprints of high-yield soybeans, a crop first developed centuries ago in China.

Rozelle said Chinese scientists have developed methods of gene insertion quite different from the technology used by U.S. biotech scientists. From what he's been able to determine, China's methods could be very competitive.

The Bee's Edie Lau can be reached at (916) 321-1098 or elau@sacbee.com . Link to original article:
http://www.sacbee.com/content/business/story/1523286p-1599749c.html

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