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Western activists opposed to genetic engineering are going to have
to buy some expensive air tickets if they want to protest about the world’s
largest trials of genetically-engineered plants. The latest news from Peking
(see This Week) is that, un-noticed by the world press, China has begun
testing genetically-engineered tobacco, tomatoes and potatoes on plots
covering several square kilometres – a far larger area than anywhere in
the West. Genetically-engineered bacteria are apparently already in use:
Chinese farmers have taken to dousing their fields with altered rhizobia
in order to boost nitrogen fixation.

The news should have been easy to predict. Unlike nuclear engineering,
genetic engineering is a portable trade: it doesn’t take much more than
a couple of clever, well-trained people and some quite inexpensive equipment
to set up a biotechnology laboratory.

China’s trials do, however, pose new dilemmas for environmentalists
and Green Party supporters, who frequently mix support for Third-World
development with opposition to genetic engineering and the biotechnology
industry. Jonathan Porritt, a leading British environmentalist summed up
one view in London recently: ‘The future of biotechnology is dictated in
thirty boardrooms around the world, and who are they serving? Answer – their
customers, their shareholders, and their business.’ Porritt’s assertion
is that biotechnology is not being developed in the interests of the world’s
poorest people.

In some respects, Porritt’s arguments are correct. Crop plants designed
to resist costly herbicides will not help subsistence farmers. Strains that
resisted drought would be far more valuable but are neglected because they
would not sell to wealthy Western farmers.

But China’s activities have added a new twist to the issue. Zhang-Lian
Chen, China’s leading biotechnologist, received extensive training in the
US – a true case of transfer of knowledge from the North to the South. He
speaks passionately of the support he is receiving from farmers. Altered
bacteria have helped them to raise their yields by up to 10 per cent. Tobacco
and tomato farmers, he says, are ‘very pleased’ with the higher yields from
genetically engineered versions of their crops, which will soon be available
much more widely in China. One wonders what they would say if anti-biotechnology
pressure groups told them to destroy all their plants.

The gains and risks of China’s programme should be open to assessment
this autumn when China hosts its first ever conference on plant biotechnology.
The session on releases of genetically engineered-organisms promises to
be especially interesting. Western experts should be there. And Western
environmentalists should remember that the relationship between North and
South may be far more complicated than it appears