China needs to grow and develop it's own GMO crops and livestock. This is an extremely disruptive tech that has tons of potential but China doesn't allow for the growing of GMO crops on it's own soil and thus most chinese companies aren't investing heavily in this area. This is despite the massive threat of having it's food supply disrupted or falling behind on core GMO technology. Or the fact that they're already buying tons of GMO crops from overseas anyway.
I know that China has had great success with cross breeding plant species, like with their salt tolerant rice, high yield hybrid rice and perennial rice, but those methods were outdated 20 years ago, it takes decades, and they're still using other outdated methods like growing crops from seeds that were in outer space, in hopes that some random mutation will give them a good strain. CRISPR allows you to actually target whatever gene you want and it takes a fraction of the time and resources.
Existing GMO crops already give a 5-10% increase in yield and the world is barely scratching the surface.
There's the current GMO crops that's changing just a handful of genes. But the real breakthrough is when you're making radically different changes to hundreds of genes. Just look at C4 rice project, it could give the world a rice strain that has 50% more yield, needs 50% less water and much less fertilizer. And you can use that knowledge to help convert even more C3 plants to C4. Or even other more lucidious ideas. Like a rice strain that has just as much protein as meat. Converting staple crops to high yield perennial strains. Livestock that's immune to most of the diseases currently in circulation and grows fast and fat without the need for anti-biotics.
This is something that China should have done 20 years ago, let alone in 2024-2025.
