Posted 17th July 2001

GM Pigs Fly According To Chinese

'Are GMOs essential for effective sustainable agriculture in a hungry world? - Dismantling the myth of genetics as the principal constraint on responsible global agricultural production' "When I (Bill Butterworth, Arable Farming (UK), 25 September 1999) was a student at Reading in the early '60's, there was a 'standard' textbook called 'Soil Conditions and Plant Growth' by E.W Russell. I still have it. It is a weighty volume. Maybe this is what we have glossed over for 25 years; the right soil conditions to unlock the genetic potential of the plant..... Those who pay more attention to soil biology get higher yields and lower costs consistently. It does seem clear that not only can we sometimes get close to double the national average yield in a variety of crops, we may be able to do it consistently, across the farm and under a wide range of farming types. The pieces of the jigsaw are beginning to fit into place and it is the balanced management of the soil rumen which is going to deliver."

Another Great Leap Seaward
by Tom Hargrove

Chinese scientists have announced using seawater to successfully irrigate and grow genetically modified crops of tomato, eggplant, and hot pepper on beaches--the world's first ocean-water irrigation, the China Daily reported on June 25, 2001. Rice and rape are the next target crops for the research group at Hainan University, on Hainan Island in southern China.

The Hainan scientists claim to have transferred genes from plants that can survive a salt-saturated environment into the fresh-water crops, said Lin Qifeng, the project's chief scientist. Mangrove is probably the salt-tolerant plant in the project, foreign scientists have told PlanetRice. A panel has approved large-scale promotion of the technology across the country, the China Daily reported. China has 20% of the world's population, but only 7% of the world's arable land. China's per capita access to fresh water is only about 20% of the world's average. Agriculture accounts for 70% of the nation's water use, and 60% of the cultivated land is short of water.

The China Daily stated that "biological molecules" of salt-resistant plants were transferred "through a pollen tube" into the susceptible plants. Dr. Ray Wu, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Cornell University, USA, explained the "pollen tube method," a biotechnology technique developed in China, that was apparently used to transfer foreign DNA into the tomato, eggplant, and pepper. "During normal fertilization, a pollen tube is formed through which pollen travels to the ovary, or egg," Wu told PlanetRice. With the pollen tube method, scientists transfer the total DNA from salt-resistant plants such as mangrove through the tube to the ovary, thus producing a transgenic plant. "But it's not certain that the transgenic plants will be truly stable and useful," Wu said. "The introduction of foreign DNA adds thousands of new genes, so the plants may continue to segregate for many generations. "But it is possible that some offspring may be stable."

The Hainan group claims that transgenic progeny have survived, irrigated with seawater, for four generations. Some fertilizer is necessary to grow these crops in seawater, Lin said. The yield and nutritional levels are about the same as normally grown crops. "The taste is even better," Lin added. Zhou Guanyu, a biologist who has developed improved varieties for decades, said the Hainan research is of great significance because of the worldwide shortage of fresh water and decrease in cultivated land. "It's a giant step forward in technological terms," she observed. The cultivation of salt-resistant crops has been a goal for international biologists for years. Scientists in Japan and the United States are reportedly conducting similar research, but Lin's team is ahead, the China Daily reported. Saline soils comprise 20% of China's total cultivated land, according to government statistics.

Salinity is on the rise, because of inappropriate irrigation systems. The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture estimates that 13 million hectares of coastal land of China, if cultivated, can produce enough to feed 150 million people.

Yu Dannian, director of the appraisal panel, said the central government will soon promote the technology China-wide.

Earlier reports of seawater irrigation

In January, PlanetRice found two obscure stories from China that scientists were experimenting on irrigating crops with seawater in vast areas of coastal provinces. We didn't publish the breakthrough news because of difficulties in verifying it. One January article stated that, "With crossbreeding and genetic manipulation, Chinese scientists have cultivated a group of halophytes capable of living in a saline environment. "A special species of wheat developed by Professor Xia [Xia Guangmin of Shandong University], for example, reported nearly 400 kilograms of yield per mu [1 hectare equals 15 mu] and tastes exactly the same as wheat grown using fresh water... "The experiment [with saltwater irrigation] is moving forward smoothly from the Yellow River Delta in east China to the Pearl River Delta in south China, where wheat and rice are growing in abundance. "Dongying and Binzhou counties, where seawater was first introduced for irrigation, reported an annual increase of millions of kilograms in agricultural output.

Potential benefits In the January reports, Professor Xia estimated that saltwater-resistant crops could bring 40 million hectares of new land into cultivation--producing 150 million metric tons of agricultural products, about 30% of China's yearly output. Prof. Xu Zhibin of Zhanjiang Oceanic University said that use of seawater for irrigation could save as much as 300 billion metric tons of fresh water--at 1/30th the cost of converting seawater to fresh water.

Oh... and pigs will fly. ...