GM: China's 'path to national glory'

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Wed Mar 29 08:55:06 PST 2000


Good news for the list's fans of genetic modification technologies. China, it seems, has made such an enormous commitment to GM research that it could well render moot any naysaying I might offer on the subject.

Today's Wall Street Journal notes: "As Western countries grow squeamish over potential problems linked to genetically modified crops, China's leaders have made genetic research their top scientific priority, seeing it as a source of stable food supplies and a path to national glory."

One early beneficiary of this has been Monsanto, of course. The WSJ's reporters notes that Monsanto's GM seeds "nearly monopolize" one seed market they visited. Interestingly, the only individual voicing doubts about GM in this article is a professor, Wei Guoshu, at Hebei Agricultural University in Baoding, whose work on the environmental impact of GM is funded by Monsanto.

States the article:

"Mr. Wei ... says the new technology has been adopted before its effect on human and nature is clear. 'Consider the example of DDT,' he says. 'At first, DDT was thought to be an effective pesticide and it was quickly put into mass use. But only much later did we learn how harmful DDT really is.'" Notes the WSJ, "For now, though, such concerns are limited to a small number of Chinese researchers."

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