AFew things overwhelm visitors to China more than sifting through the 20-page menus in restaurants. In a country where hunger is a visceral memory, and the traditional greeting is still ‘Chi le ma?’,or ‘have you eaten?’, nothing celebrates success like a lavish meal. That’s why 24-course banquets have become standard fare for business lunches, and ordering culinary delicacies, such as scorpions for the affluent and sea cucumber for the more humble, is the ultimate luxury here. But the gusto with which most Chinese tuck into their meals hides a troubling truth — China is running short of food.

UNCERTAIN FUTURE: Chinese farmers at work

China’s total food production has been falling steadily since the 1990s, mostly due to water shortages, loss of arable land to urbanisation, and a shift to cash crops. Last year, China produced 355 million tonnes of grain, making it one of the largest food growers in the world. But that was about 5 per cent less than its total production for 2004.

According to Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC, China is expected to import about 30 million tonnes of food by 2010.

So far, Beijing has dealt with the problem by spending about $4 billion a year on food imports and releasing grain from its swollen silos, which are estimated to be holding some 200 million tonnes of grain, into the market. But the increasing pressure is leading the Chinese government to reconsider the mass commercialisation of food grown using genetically modified organisms (GMO). As a first step, the government is likely to soon permit cultivation and marketing of GMO rice, says Huang Ji Kun, an agronomist with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) in Beijing.

“Extensive tests and research has been conducted and, I believe, now the government is in favour of GMO technology,” he said.

Until now, no nation has commercialised a major GMO grain like rice and wheat that are staple foods for billions of people. China was one of the few countries to approve some GMO cash crops, such as cotton and corn, in the 1990s. But, in 2000, it was jolted by global concern over the long-term effects of GMOs and joined other nations, including India, in suspending new approvals. Since China is now the world’s largest producer of rice, any decision it takes will greatly influence other governments, including that of India, writes Robert L. Paarlberg, an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in the journal, Issues in Science and Technology.

GMO crops have been controversial since they were invented in the mid-1970s. While proponents say they can save the world’s rising and increasingly prosperous population from hunger, concerns that these ‘Franken foods’ can damage health, the environment and agro-economies have hampered their acceptability in most countries. Now, the old debate over GMOs is being rekindled in China, with each side accusing the other of using selective data to manipulate consumers and officials.

Huang says his research “clearly shows farmers growing Bt Cotton (a GMO cotton manufactured by Monsanto) earned $225 more per hectare per year” than farmers growing traditional cotton, because GMOs use less pesticides and give higher yields.

That’s a carefully crafted argument positioning GMOs as a single solution to three of China’s most pressing problems. Not only are China’s top leaders grappling with how to grow more food, they’re desperately searching for ways to mollify the country’s increasingly restive peasants, who make just about $350 a year and were chiefly responsible for the 87,000 public protests that swept China last year. The promise of reducing pesticide use in this country, which uses twice the amount per tonne of food as the US, is also an emotive issue with the government, for which cleaning up China’s environment is a top priority.

But Ma Tianjie, a Greenpeace activist in Beijing, says Huang and other scientists and agronomists supporting GMOs have “a credibility problem” because they have uncomfortably close links with GMO manufacturers like Monsanto, Bayer, Du Pont and Syngenta.

“Companies are forming alliances with scientists to lobby the government and shape public opinion”, says Ma. “For example, Jia Shirong, a professor at CAAS and member of the government’s Safety Committee on Agricultural Biotechnology, is also on the board of a leading biotech company.”

In reality, Ma says, the promise of GMO crops hides poison. “GMO crops pose unknown health and environmental hazards. GMO companies don’t give independent researchers detailed information on their products, saying this would expose their trade secrets.”

Shi-min Fang, a Chinese technology expert whose blog exposes scientific fraud in China, said the “ignorance and disinformation spread by extreme environmentalists” is creating a “public panic about GMO rice and other crops”.

“The US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) has stated it does not believe that new plant varieties under development for food and feed use pose any safety or regulatory concerns,” Shi-min said. “Bt, (the protein in Bt Cotton) is one of the safest natural pesticides (and) has been used as a biological pesticide in organic farming since the 1950s.”

But activists aren’t comforted. “Even cigarettes were widely used for 100 years and the USFDA said there was no proof they were addictive”, they retort.

These differing stands appear to be irreconcilable as they are rooted in the way GMO seeds are developed — by fusing natural seeds with genes from other micro-organisms, plants and even animals. The alien genes then produce toxins in the plant that kill any insects trying to eat it. Huang says this is why GMOs boost yields, as they reduce losses to field pests.

Another GMO technique is to insert a natural seed with an alien gene that makes the crop tolerant to a specific pesticide, usually one the company makes itself. This allows farmers to use that pesticide to kill weeds, but leaves the crop unharmed. Huang says this is how GMOs lower pesticide usage, which “saves farmers lots of money and is also good for the environment”.

That amuses Ma, who says that when such arguments are closely examined, it’s clear that the real financial beneficiaries of GMO crops are the GMO companies themselves.

“Look at the commercial system GMOs create,” he says. “They’re designed to trap farmers into using expensive seeds and pesticides from a single company,” often throwing them into debt and threatening to cede control of the agricultural system to foreign GMO manufacturers.

Crops grown from GMO seeds cannot be used as seeds themselves, like traditional crops, so farmers have to buy new seeds every year. Since GMO seeds are patented, companies usually charge a hefty premium. The terms that farmers have to sign when buying GMO seeds are also unfair and too complex for them to understand, says Ma. For example, a farmer cannot sow seeds left over from the previous year. If he does, he can be sued.

Also, since GMO seeds can only be used with a single pesticide, usually one made by the GMO manufacturer, “ultimately the companies make monopoly profits from first the sale of the seeds and then from the sale of the pesticide”, says Ma. Significantly, if GMO seeds inter-breed with natural seeds in the field, they could end up destroying the natural seed varieties forever.

Local opinion polls say this has fuelled consumer resistance to GMO crops, more so since China has no GMO food labelling system at the retail level.

Many Chinese farmers, particularly small subsistence farmers who eat the food they grow, are loath to use GMO seeds. “Who wants to eat a crop that kills pests who eat it?” says Li Ming Fu, a farmer from Xi Shuang Ban Na village in southern Yunnan. “It’s not natural (and) no one I know likes the idea.” In fact, Sun Min, deputy director, Centre for Development Research, Shenzhen, says farmers use pesticides only to grow the food they sell and use traditional pest control methods on the food they eat.

Li said he protects his crops using a traditional technique called ‘rice-fish’ farming, in which certain fish that like eating insects are released into a rice field to control pests.

Ma feels the Chinese government should encourage such organic farming methods if it wants to help farmers earn more and give consumers what they want. The organic food industry in China has increased 10-fold over the last decade, and though it’s only worth about $200 million today, organic produce could rise to form 20 per cent of its total food market by 2020.

CAAS has criticised that idea saying China’s food production could shrink by 50 per cent or more if the country goes the organic route and rejects GMOs.

But the point may already be moot. In April, investigations revealed that some Chinese companies were selling GMO rice illegally. Though the government promised to crack down on them, when German food testing company Genescan randomly tested rice being sold in southern Guangdong, much of it turned out to be genetically modified.