Thanks to Ms. Kong and Mr. Chen who invited me to participate in the Forum. I am going to give a very big subject, which shall be given by the Agriculture Minister and the Minister of Environment Protection. But, I want to add a remark which is only my humble suggestions without any political purpose.
As we all know the agricultural development is a very significant milestone in human society development. Agriculture emerged in the Middle East 10000 years ago. Private property occurred along with the developed agriculture, and then the tribe, village, city and country, and also the gap between rich and poor were appeared. After more than 10000 years of development, the modern agriculture has to solve the problems of food and clothing of 7.5 billion people in the world. Only in China, the population is 1.38 billion, so we can imagine the agriculture development is an important factor for human society development.
But the agriculture development runs in opposite directions of species diversity at the beginning. The so-called agriculture is the domestication of a few species. Till now, there are only 43 main agriculture plants and 9 types of livestock plus 7.5 billion people, 39% to 50% of the world land area is occupied. Only take wheat as the example, its planting area is ten times of the land area of the UK. Thus, the agriculture development is one of the significant reasons causing the extinction of the other species.
Agriculture development is also one of the main reasons causing environmental pollution. The consumption of pesticide and chemical fertilizer has increased by 24 times in the last 50 years, the pesticide and chemical fertilizer not only pollute the local soil and water, but also can be spread by atmosphere to cause long-distance pollution. We can smell air pollution but not water pollution and soil pollution. Treating water and soil pollution is a very long-term mission. Thus, agriculture exerts comprehensive influences on people’s health.
I only talked about the disadvantages just now. Now I give its advantages. Agriculture is the foundation for people’s health. We get both energy and nutrients from food. Maybe the young kids now do not know that when we were young, our parents gave us cod liver oil because of food insufficiency at that time. Cod liver oil is the supplement for providing Vitamin A, which cannot be generated by human body but must be got from food. The countries in Southeast Asia take rice which lacks a lot of nutrients as the main food, and then about 190 million children get the deficiency of Vitamin A in the world every year. When I saw this figure, I cannot believe it, is it true? It is a very big health problem. About 670 thousand people dead and 250 thousand people become blind because of deficiency of Vitamin A in the world every year.
To solve the above problems, we have to develop new agriculture technologies. The main modern agriculture technology is the gene- modified plants. We all know it is a very sensitive issue. The dispute about genetic modification directly relates to the national political and economic interests and the public popular science education. Why it relates to the national political and economic interests? Because China is the biggest agriculture country in the world. In 2015, the agriculture yield in China is 2 times of that of India and 3 times of America. Thus, the basic agriculture research in China is the key issue relating to national welfare and the people's livelihood and national security.
How to solve these conflicts brought by agriculture? Firstly, it needs to increase the yield of agriculture products, i.e., get the highest yield in the smallest cultivated land area. We can return the surplus farmland to the nature in this way. This work has been carried out for many years. The first significant progress is the Green Revolution in the 1970s. The leader Dr. Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize at that time. He is an American botanist and found the dwarf, high-yield and anti-disease wheat variety in Mexico supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Before Green Revolution, America needed to import 50% wheat and after that America begun to export wheat. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation also supported the work in the international rice institute in the Philippines, and at the same time the dwarf rice was found, which yield was increased for about 10 times. The molecular mechanism ofthese dwarf plants were not known at that time. The basic research in recent years found they are the mutant of growth hormone. Because of the mutation, the dwarf plants can use the growth energy to produce seeds, which significantly increases the yield.
Besides improving the yield of agriculture products, we also need to improve the quality of agriculture products. Just now I mentioned rice is the main food which lacks of nutrients. We want to solve the deficiency of vitamin A if people take rice as the main food. One solution is enabling the rice to generate the precursor carotene of vitamin A. The three enzymes required by the biochemical pathway to generate the carotene do not exist in rice, and the genes of these three enzymes need to be cloned from the other plants and microorganisms, and multiple steps of genetic modification have to be carried out to enable the rice to generate the carotene. Thus, this work had been carried out for a long time before the final success.
The genetically modified rice, which can generate carotene, is called Gold Rice because of its gold color. I had a thought yesterday, there is not any link between Gold Rice and money; thus, the name is not proper, because it is for solving the deficiency of vitamin A of the poor children. Golden Rice is a better name.
When it was started, the work of the Golden Rice is sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and then Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and done by three scientists from Switzerland and Germany. Their findings were published in 2001; however, the Golden Rice hasn’t been actually applied yet because of political and economic reasons. 16 years have passed, and many children died of deficiency of vitamin A. The scientists inventing the Golden Rice are heroes in my heart. To popularize the Golden Rice, they are forced to be the social activists. With their hard work, the Golden Rice has gotten the support of the Pope recently. The Golden Rice is the best example of using the genetic modification technology to improve the quality of agriculture products.
Another problem is the environment influence caused by pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Same as people, plants also may be sick, that is why pesticide appears. One method for lowering pesticide consumption and reducing environment pollution is increasing the plants’ own disease resistance, insect resistance and anti-reversion force. Observed from the data of the Ministry of Agriculture of America, we know America has begun to plant the genetically modified soybean which can resist weeds. And the cotton and corn resisting weeds and insects were also planted in the farmland since 1996. In the last 20 years, the planting area of these genetically modified plants continuously increasesd, and till now, almost all of the soybeans in America and 80% to 90% of corn and cotton are genetically modified types. We also know China imports a great amount of soybean from America.
After 20 years of farmland practice, no negative influence of these genetically modified plants on people or animals has been found till now. On the contrary, these genetically modified plants greatly reduce the consumption of pesticides, herbicides and insecticides in America, and play a great positive role for environment protection and restoring species diversity. Also, 107 Nobel Prize winners jointly signed the letter to Greenpeace for supporting the research and implementation of genetically modified plants.
Besides resisting insects and weeds, the genetically modified plants also aim to resist diseases. Indicated by the tables published on Science magazine in 2013, many disease resistant genes are transferred into different plants by the genetic modification technology in the past years. I would like to give an example here; it is the anti-virus genetically modified papaya which was approved for use in 1997. The papaya trees in the photo have grown for years but are infected by viruses. You will know which are the anti-disease genetically modified plants and which are not before I tell you the answer, because all of the front papaya trees which are not genetically modified died, but all of the back papaya trees which are genetically modified survived and can resist viruses. Thus, what we worry about for food safety actually relates to the nature of the agriculture, and is not brought by the genetic modification technology.
Every example I mentioned just now is only to transfer one anti-body and only one disease can be resisted. In this way, a lot of time will be spent for each product; thus, my laboratory has been studying the plant broad spectrum resistance, which cannot be created by only one protein but by expressing many proteins, which may influence the plant growth. Please look at the plants in the middle of my photo, although they have high broad spectrum resistance, they are very small and low in yield, and cannot be applied in agriculture. To solve this problem, now we are researching how to make the plant only immediately express the proteins of broad spectrum resistance, when it is just infected by bacteria but not always express these proteins. The immediate expression technology can enable the plants to have the broad spectrum resistance, but the plants can grow like the plants which are not genetically modified. Thus, I believe the achievements of basic researches can be applied to the plant surface, so as to reduce the pesticide consumption, which is significant for environment protection.
Before the end, I would like to share the collection of the photos of wild flowers, which I took in Duke Forest this summer. People ever been there know Duke University is in the forest covering more than 7 000 acres. But few people know the forest was a farmland used for growing cotton 100 years ago. Severe soil depletion was caused after many years of cotton growth, and the yields became lower. Around 1920, there was no harvest. Then the waste land was bought by Duke University and pines and oaks were planted. 100 years later, Duke Forest thrives and becomes the good place for research and leisure, and also it is a good example of returning the farmland to the nature. I wish with the development of agriculture, we can return more and more lands for feeding us in the past to the nature, and then make the species diversified again in the future. Thank you!