Worried that its fragmented seed industry is falling behind multinational companies, China is finishing up a 10-year plan to create national champion seed companies. A 2-year-old plan hatched by Xi Jinping to create a "Silicon Valley" for seeds--the so-called "silicon chips of agriculture"--has big ambitions, but it depends on funding from overextended State banks and the basic matter of acquiring farmland to grow the seeds.
On March 1, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) held a meeting to boost implementation of a 2023-2030 "South China Seed Silicon Valley Construction Plan." According to the Ministry, the project will build a sprawling complex of labs and testing/propagation farms in Hainan Province, a region where seed breeders have long focused their work due to the ability to grow crops year-round in the sub-tropical climate. The South China zone is planned to be a center for seed breeding innovation in China, a platform for international cooperation, and an experimental zone for reforming the country's seed industry.
The "Silicon Valley" scheme is described as an upgrade from the 2015-2025 "National South China Seed Research and Breeding Base (Hainan) Construction Plan" that called for setting up a 44,150-acre protected zone for crop breeding around the Yazhou Bay "Science City." In a 2018 inspection, Xi Jinping praised the South China Seed Base as a national treasure and ordered construction of a "Southern Silicon Valley" that would concentrate R&D, production, sales, scientific exchange, and dissemination of seeds to serve the entire country.
The 2025 Central Document No. 1 on rural policy--released to the public just a few days before the meeting--included the "South Silicon Valley" project in its instructions to revitalize the seed industry.
A symposium on revitalization of the seed industry held by MARA December 19, 2024 made it clear that the effort is aimed at making China great again. MARA described seed industry revitalization as having a prominent position in building China into an agricultural power by achieving self-reliance and self-improvement in seed technology and independent control of seed sources and ensuring the security of the agricultural industry.
Chinese leaders seem worried that their industry is falling behind multinational seed companies. At the seed industry symposium, Agriculture Minister Han Jun warned that China's seed industry still has many shortcomings and weaknesses, "international giants are seizing the commanding heights of seed technology," and "the domestic seed industry is in urgent need of innovation, breakthroughs, and upgrades."
China's seed industry plan reflects chronic problems of fragmentation between R&D (conducted mainly by research institutes) and marketing of seeds done by thousands of companies that traditionally conducted little or no R&D. Incentives for academic scientists to create seeds that meet market demand were muted when scholars stood no chance of profiting from their research. Profits from successful seeds were shrunk by widespread copying and fraudulent imitations.
The December seed industry symposium called for
- creating a commercial breeding system with companies as the main body
- nurturing and strengthening a group of high-level seed companies
- deep integration of production, education, and research
Ag Minister Han Jun said support policies should be targeted at seed companies to help them breed a new batch of varieties that improve yield, performance, and quality. These include financing and insurance for companies. Han also emphasized protection of intellectual property and a crackdown on "infringement and illegal crimes" to "purify" the seed market.
The rationale for the South Silicon Valley Seed project is made clear by Minister Han's comments at the December seed industry revitalization meeting. Han called for innovative mechanisms to share and utilize resources and facilities to promote cooperation between S&T companies. This includes linking up seed companies with scientific institutes and financial institutions via seed bases. Han called for new ways to utilize scientific and technical expertise, application of artificial intelligence in breeding, construction of digital facilities and equipment to keep up with the world's cutting-edge pace in breeding.
According to state-owned news magazine Liaowang, the Hainan Provincial seed lab, China Seed Group's Syngenta, and Huada Genetics have been working together on projects since 2021.
Liaowang reported that Hainan has gathered more than 2,800 seed industry companies, and the output value of the South China Seed Industry exceeded 12 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 50%.
The December 2024 meeting was attended by heads of China's elite seed companies, such as Syngenta China, Longping High-Tech, Beijing DBN, Beidahuang Kenfeng Seeds, Hefei Fengle, Shandong Denghai, and Gansu Dunhuang, as well as companies engaged in poultry, swine, aquaculture, and feed manufacturing, academic institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, two agricultural universities, and state-owned banks Agricultural Development Bank of China and Agricultural Bank of China.
None of these articles mention problems acquiring land for the giant seed project.
A Hainan Province regulation to facilitate acquisition of land for the South China Seed Breeding Base published last week reveals that progress in acquiring fields for the 44,150-acre protected zone designated 10 years ago has been slow because many Hainan farmers have been unwilling to turn over their land, there are a bewildering array of intermediaries to deal with in acquiring land, procedures are not standardized, and length of land contracts varies.
One step China took to compete with multinational seed companies was to buy one of them. In 2017 ChemChina paid $43 billion to acquire Swiss agrichemical and seed breeder Syngenta, China's largest overseas acquisition. Syngenta is still headquartered in Switzerland.
Plans for a public listing of Syngenta in China--anticipated to raise $9 billion--have been scrapped due to the poor state of China's stock market.
In their U.S. business
Syngenta and its American CEO are now caught up in the frenzy over Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland. Syngenta owns multiple farms in the United States used for crop trials, and Arkansas has already ordered Syngenta to sell its 160 acres in that state. This raises the question of how the company will develop and test chemicals for the large U.S. market for seeds and farm chemicals if it cannot own any land there.
Syngenta announced last week that the company has made a deal with the Shanghai government to build its 3rd global crop protection innovation hub at a site in Shanghai (the other two are in Switzerland and the UK). This giant facility will focus on crop protection chemicals, biologicals, soil health, sustainable chemistry, and integrated pest management.
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