China’s agriculture ministry promised a more intensified crackdown on illegally cultivated genetically modified crops to ensure the safety of food products in the country.
Ministry of Agriculture senior official Liao Xiyuan revealed to the South China Morning Post how Beijing plans to make the safety of the country's GM produce doubt-free.
According to Liao, the Chinese government is imposing a "checks and balances" procedure to ensure that only authorized GM crop growers supply food products in the market in order to ease worries and the mounting public skepticism over the technology.
Why Chinese Hate GMO
While it has been seen as a beneficial technology especially in China which is deemed a major agricultural nation, many still doubt the safety of genetically modified organisms.
"The technology is getting better and more predictable, but the controversy is also getting bigger," Beijing-based Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology plant geneticist Caixia Gao told the New Yorker.
China is one of the six top growers of GM crops, joining Argentina, Brazil, Canada, the United States and India per a record from the GMO Compass, but it is also the nation that is home to many people who doubt the security of the technology.
In fact, GM propagators like Zhang Qifa, one of the first scientists who were allowed to conduct experiments on GM rice to ensure its safety, had repeatedly received threats to his life, sometimes leading to personal attacks.
"Zhang Qifa is a traitor!" a woman from the audience shouted at him while he was lecturing about GMOs at the China Agricultural University in Beijing in 2010 when another member of the audience threw a ceramic mug at him.
According to the New Yorker, it is possible that the Chinese media as well as entities from the ideological community fueled the hate for GMs, which has also been linked to "general anti-Western sentiment."
Why China's GM Crops Are Safe
Despite high volumes of criticism on the technology, China remains insistent that the Chinese people give it a chance since it provides farmers with a solution to their pest problems.
According to Liao, scientists in the mainland have already developed pest-resistant GM strains of corn, rice and soybeans, as well as 147 pest-resistant varieties of cotton that would minimize the farmers' reliance on pesticides.
Furthermore, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences' Wu Kongming said that China has the "most stringent safety procedures" for the technology all over the globe.
China currently cultivates about 11.6 million hectares or 6 percent of the planet's GM crops that include cotton, poplars, papaya, tomato and peppers.