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(The plant, which incorporates DNA from a soil bacterium that’s harmful to insects, makes up 90 percent of the cotton crop and by one estimate produces a $1 billion annual economic gain for farmers.) But the story seems to end more than a decade ago.Ĭhina’s ruling Communist Party faces rising popular opposition to GMOs. And there’s a stalk representing the big GMO success story that used this approach: Bt cotton, a pest-resistant variety that has been planted widely in China for 15 years, greatly increasing production while slashing pesticide use. Yes, there’s a 1990s-era gene gun, which used high-pressure gas to blast DNA-coated particles into plant cells to create early transgenic crops. The museum also says nothing about the most fought-over product of modern-day agricultural technology: genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. As many as 45 million people died, most by starvation. Yuan himself lived through Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” of 1958–1961, which triggered a collapse in food production and distribution by banning private farming in favor of vast collective farms. (In general, hybrids are more vigorous and higher-yielding than the parent varieties.) He later found such plants and, together with other researchers, created a process to make high-yielding hybrids year after year, revolutionizing rice production.īut the exhibits don’t mention the vast suffering wrought by Chinese agricultural failure. A display honors Yuan Longping, China’s revered “father of hybrid rice,” who in the mid-1960s posited that if he could find male-sterile rice plants-ones unable to self-pollinate-he could create hybrid strains reliably and at large scale. These millennia-old innovations are matched by those of the past century.
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Some 2,500 years ago, the Chinese also invented the first really efficient iron ploughshares, called kuan, with a curved V shape that efficiently turned hard soil. Today, rice is the nation’s (and half the world’s) most important crop.
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The site, which is attached to the Ministry of Agriculture, promises that it will “acquaint visitors with the brilliant agricultural history of China”-but what’s missing from the official presentation is as telling as what’s on display.Īt least 9,000 years ago, people living in China were the first to cultivate rice, developing elaborate irrigation systems.
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Few make the trek to the city’s east side and its more tranquil China Agricultural Museum, where several formal buildings are set amid sparkling ponds ringed by lotus plants in full pink bloom. It is a hot, smoggy July weekend in Beijing, and the gates to the Forbidden City are thronged with tens of thousands of sweat-drenched tourists.