China prudent in GM farm produce
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-06-18 09:03
China is prudent in developing genetically modified (GM) farm produce but it
will keep working in bio-engineering for agriculture, said an agricultural
official at a forum on food safety held in Harbin on
Saturday.
Luo Bin, deputy director of Farm Produce Quality Safety Center
under the Ministry of Agriculture, said that China has developed over 100
varieties of GM farm produce, but the ministry has only allowed five categories
of them to go on market, which are soybean, corn, oil-seed rape, cotton and
tomato.
"The development, production and sales of GM farm produce are
very strictly controlled in China, " said Luo at the International Forum on the
Safety of Farm Produce held in this capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang
Province.
The most widely planted GM product in China is cotton. The
country has 8 million ha of farmland under over 30 varieties of cotton crops
modified with anti-pest genes, since they were first introduced to farmers in
1998.
The growing of GM cotton helped reduce the use of pesticides by
50,000 tons, bringing about economic returns of 16.8 billion yuan (2.1 billion
U.S. dollars), said Luo.
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