You've heard of foreign spies stealing military secrets, but what you might not expect is someone stealing our seeds and selling them abroad, leading to a conviction for "illegally providing intelligence to foreign entities."
Just yesterday, CCTV News posted on Weibo, reporting that our hybrid rice had been stolen.
The reason behind this is that the general manager of a domestic agricultural technology company collaborated with foreign spies to illegally sell prohibited hybrid rice parent seeds at high prices for trial planting. Now that it's been uncovered, they're facing over a year of imprisonment.
Digging deeper, it's revealed that there are many more "rat droppings" domestically, illegally selling various high-quality Chinese seed resources abroad.
Once this news broke, it immediately skyrocketed to the top of the trending list.
Netizens are even more excited, spewing saliva as if each mouthful could drown the old brother.
You might wonder, what's so valuable about stealing seeds?
Believe it or not, secretly selling seeds is considered espionage in our country.
According to Article 11 of the Seed Law of the People's Republic of China, the state enjoys sovereignty over germplasm resources. In other words, exporting seeds or collaborating with foreign institutions requires approval from relevant authorities.
Moreover, what he stole wasn't just ordinary seeds, but parent seeds.
You see, these are the "parents" of the seeds you can find on the market. In broader terms, this concerns our food supply. So, let's delve into this matter today.
First, let's explain what parent seeds are.
In academic terms, "parent seeds are generally the first-generation seeds used for hybridization experiments, and their offspring won't undergo trait separation."
In simpler terms, they are seeds that consistently pass on desirable genetic traits.
Specifically, parent seeds possess carefully selected high-quality characteristics such as high yield, disease resistance, and lodging resistance. Therefore, parent seeds are often used to breed seeds for crop production.
Moreover, parent seeds can also be used for multi-generational selection and improvement. For instance, the hybrid rice variety Shanyou 63, seen on the market, is a cross between Minghui 63 and Zhenshan 97A, and Minghui 63 is a cross between IR30 and Gui630.
You might ask, can't I just take commercially available seeds and breed them?
It's not that simple.
A single parent seed doesn't possess all the desirable genes. So, to develop superior varieties, researchers typically crossbreed parent seeds with different desirable traits.
For example, crossing parent seeds with traits like resistance to lodging and high yield can result in a rice variety that is both high-yielding and resistant to lodging.
But due to the complexity of genetic inheritance, hybrid vigor typically only manifests in the F1 offspring.
In other words, as this rice variety is further bred, its F2 and subsequent generations may experience trait segregation, meaning they may not necessarily carry the superior genes of the parents and could exhibit a variety of traits.
This is also why the hybrid rice seeds available in the market are usually one-time use; you have to buy them again the following year.
Due to this genetic instability, if a spy simply buys seeds from the market, chances are they won't yield much.
So, instead of cultivating their own, it's quicker, cheaper, and avoids the risk of diluting desirable traits to just steal the parent seeds for experimentation.
But can you tolerate the fact that all the hard work put in by researchers is being sold off like this?
Remember, after Yuan found a high-yielding natural hybrid rice plant in the field, he kept searching for male-sterile plants.
Back then, Yuan Longping proposed the "Three-Line Method" for hybrid rice breeding, which involved the restoration line, maintenance line, and sterile line. To truly complete this cycle, it was necessary to find male sterile plants.
During that era, without machinery, Yuan and his team painstakingly inspected each plant in the field with magnifying glasses. It took them 8 years to find the first female parent of the legendary superior hybrid rice, "Wild Abortive."
Just finding a male sterile plant took 8 years. Afterward, they still needed to transfer the sterility gene from "Wild Abortive" to cultivated rice, cross it with other parent seeds, making the entire breeding process tedious and lengthy.
All this effort actually concerns whether or not many of us can eat and whether we can afford to eat.
Although this incident is unlikely to affect our meals this time, as only a bit of the germplasm was stolen, it doesn't hinder our ongoing breeding efforts.
But it's still considered "providing intelligence to foreign countries" because the seed issue, at its core, is a matter of national food security. No matter how small the risk, it must be fiercely guarded against.
Imagine if we didn't properly protect and develop our own seeds, leading to a country's food supply being "choked." What consequences do you think would arise?
For instance, there used to be an agricultural giant in the United States called Monsanto (now acquired by another giant, Bayer). They took a wild soybean germplasm we sent them and engineered it into genetically modified soybean seeds. Then, they turned around and filed for over sixty patents, monopolizing and selling them at high prices.
During the Argentine debt crisis, Monsanto deceitfully sold genetically modified soybean seeds to Argentina at a low price. Argentina, thinking it had struck a bargain, handed over 99% of its GMO soybean production to Monsanto.
However, within just two years, Monsanto turned around and demanded patent fees. When Argentina refused, Monsanto threatened to cut off the supply. In the end, unable to resist, Argentina had to accept its fate.
Closer to home, recent decisions from India, Russia, and the UAE to restrict rice exports have sent global rice prices soaring.
While our country isn't at risk of rice shortages, there's still a notable gap in seed resources compared to other nations.
Let's dive into the numbers: from 2019 to 2022, China's seed imports far exceeded exports, with an annual expenditure of nearly 3 billion USD on purchasing seeds from abroad.
Additionally, our seeds are primarily imported from the United States, Chile, and Denmark.
In other words, our reliance on imported seeds is quite high.
And perhaps many people are unaware that seeds for vegetables like tomatoes, broccoli, carrots, onions, and spinach consistently dominate the seed import list year-round.
I even suspect that the tomatoes and eggs I had tonight, as well as the carrot and meat stir-fry, might have vegetables with foreign origins.
For instance, the Sakata 7-inch carrot seeds supplied by Japan were once hyped up to 13,000 CNY per can.
And broccoli seeds were hyped up to 18,000 CNY per packet, while a variety of cherry tomato seeds cost 8 CNY per tiny grain, or 4,000 CNY per gram.
If, as mentioned earlier, farmers have to buy new seeds every season, a large portion of their profits might end up going to seed sellers.
Not to mention that if strategic resources like rice and soybeans were to be choked off, the so-called "food wars" might not be a joke anymore.
So, ultimately, the value of seeds lies in their importance to people's livelihoods.
It's undeniable that our country's seed industry started late, with some distance in terms of research and investment compared to some developed countries.
However, in recent years, it has been observed that domestically produced alternatives in the seed sector are gradually gaining ground in China.
For example, the soybean variety "Dongsheng 118" bred by the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences can be grown in saline-alkali soil.
According to statistics, among the top 10 rice, wheat, corn, and soybean varieties currently being promoted nationwide, 98% are domestically bred varieties.
Regarding the protection of seed intellectual property rights, the revised "Seed Law" has repeatedly emphasized the protection of seed industry intellectual property rights, expanding the scope of protection for plant variety rights.
It's possible that soon our farmers will be able to buy domestically produced seeds that are both low-priced and high-quality. Then, our tables might be filled with a variety of affordable and delicious fruits and vegetables. Isn't that just taking off directly?
