NEWS: China to Increase Spending On Agricultural Biotechnology
All Headline News
By Richard Bowden
March 16, 2007
Beijing, China -- China is expected to increase its spending on agricultural biotechnology almost five fold by 2010 in an attempt to improve food security for its rapidly increasing population the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
China's population, currently 1.3 billion or twenty percent of the world's total, is expected to rise to 1.5 billion by 2020. Yet with only seven percent of the world's arable land, China needs to address the problem of feeding its people.
By increasing its research in genetically modified food products, China hopes to lessen its dependency on other countries for food products such as soy beans.
"The government takes the issue of food security seriously," said Zhang Liang Chen, president of the Agricultural University of China. "Last year we imported 17m tonnes of soybean from the US, Brazil and Argentina. This dependency could lead to trouble in the future."
Already accounting for twenty percent of the world's investment into global research into agricultural biotechnology, the spending is expected to more than quadruple as China attempts to meet soaring food demand….
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