Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

All too often attention is focused on the West when issues touching on genetic engineering and biotechnology are discussed. The United States is regarded - quite justly - as the spiritual center and the economic Dorado of the biosciences. However, it is all too easy to loss sight of the fact that new technologies are exercising a perhaps even greater attraction in other parts of the world and that this attraction could in the short or long term also lead to fundamental shifts in the scientific and also in the economic "balance of power". In the opinion of American and Chinese scientists such a change can currently be observed in relation to the introduction of green gene technology, in other words the production of transgenic crop plants.

In yesterday's issue of the journal "Science" (issue 295, p. 674) scientists report that China has over the past four years set itself the target of establishing the "largest biotechnological capacity" outside the North America in this field. The group around Jikun Huang from the academy of Chinese Sciences has evaluated official statistics and carried out surveys at industrial and research facilities in nine provinces and large cities. In addition, three hundred small farmers in northern China were interviewed for the study.

The results of this study are quite surprising in the clear picture they present. For China, in its commitment to green gene technology, has not only overtaken other similar developing and newly industrialized countries enthusiastic about cutting-edge technology, such as Brazil or India, but has apparently also outstripped many industrial countries in this sector. The giant country already spends more than 112 million dollars each year for plant biotechnology - an amount equaled by only a few industrial countries. And if the government succeeds in carrying through its programs, China will in 2005 spend in China each third D-mark that countries worldwide invest in this industry.

Enthusiasm for biotechnology among China's agricultural elite dates from the second half of the '80s. At the time individual government laboratories carried out their first genetic engineering experiments. Today, more than fifty different plant varieties and around 120 agriculturally interesting genes are used for the production of transgenic varieties. Nowhere else in the world is such a variety to be found. In recent years Chinese scientists have focused more and more on genes that can enable farmers to benefit in processing, mainly therefore genes that make the plants resistant against various pests and pathogenic agents. No other country has at present collected more experience.

More than 90 percent of the field trials relate to resistant varieties. A very promising rice variety in which scientists incorporated genes that make it resistant to three of the main pests in China has been undergoing outdoor trials for two years. It also seems quite probable that this rice will come on the market soon. Government authorities are in any case very open minded toward biotechnology: almost two thirds of the 353 applications for field releases or marketing filed alone for the years 1996 to 2000 were approved after a very short time.