China has the world's strictest food safety evaluation system for genetically modified (GM) foods and is a world leader in the development of GM technology, a national GM safety committee member said.
Before GM organisms can be issued a safety certificate in China, they must first undergo lab tests before moving on to small-scale field tests and finally to environmental release and production tests. The five-phase evaluation system is the only such system in the world, Wu Kongming, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a member of the country's agricultural GM safety committee, told attendees at a conference on Wednesday.
China will carry on researching and developing GM technology for staple foods, such as pest-resistant rice and drought-resistant wheat, while working to industrialize the cultivation of non-food crops such as pest-resistant cotton and corn during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), Liao Xiyuan, a senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture, said at the conference.
Liao added that China has made remarkable progress in the GM plants industry with a total of 1,036 patents in gene-cloning technology, second only to the U.S. The wide variety of GM crops developed by the country includes 147 kinds of cotton resistant to pests.
China's GM industry has been beset by widespread public concern that GM food may detrimentally affect people's health. In response, Wu dismissed widespread speculation that GM food causes cancer and reduces male fertility, calling such claims "groundless rumors."
China currently allows the commercial production of only one GM food crop - papayas - while other imported GM food crops, including soybeans and corn, are used only as raw materials, Wu said.
