| Title | China Serious in Getting Out of GMO Crops | |
| Date | Friday August 22 2014, @08:22PM | |
| Author | n1 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the government-killing-business dept. | ||
RT reports China is quite serious in ending its own GMO programs amid public concerns on GM crops:
China’s Ministry of Agriculture has decided not to continue with a program which developed genetically-modified rice and corn. Some environmentalists say public concerns about GM crops played a key role in the decision.
On August 17, when these permits were up for renewal, the Ministry of Agriculture decided not to extend them. In 2009, the ministry's Biosafety Committee issued approval certificates to develop the two crops, rice and corn.
According to the South China Morning Post, state television commissioned tests on five packets of rice, which were picked at random, and found three contained genetically-modified rice. It is illegal to sell or commercially grow GM rice in mainland China. The safety certificates issued in 2009 only allowed the rice to be planted for research purposes, but never for sale on the open market.
The strain, which was found, was one of two developed by Dr. Zhang Oifa, who is a professor at the Huazhong Agricultural University. He said, "it was not impossible" for the seeds to be put on to the open market. "You can't say [the seeds] were leaked on purpose. It's possible the seed companies have taken away the seeds and reproduced them illegally," he said, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
The move comes after a (relatively) recent ban on the importation of GMO crops in China: as early as Nov 2013, China started to reject shipload of GMO corn from US with specific restrictions put in place later, affecting also livestock feed concentrates and even GMO lucerne hay.
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printed from SoylentNews, China Serious in Getting Out of GMO Crops on 2024-04-18 23:09:35