Research and development on plant biotechnology is flourishing in China, which now accounts for half of the developing world's expenditures on plant biotechnology, according to a study by researchers at UC Davis and in China.

Findings from the study will appear in the January 25 issue of the journal Science.

"In the past decade, China has been accelerating its investments in agricultural biotechnology research and is making breakthroughs on commodities that have been mostly ignored in the laboratories of industrialized countries," says Scott Rozelle, a professor in the agricultural and resource economics department at UC Davis. "If China's success with genetically modified cotton is any predictor of future achievements, we can expect that plant biotechnology in China will have a significant impact on world production, consumption, nutrition and trade."

In the late 1980s, China's scientists began research aimed at developing a genetically modified cotton plant that would produce a natural pesticide against the destructive bollworm. A gene was synthesized and inserted into cotton plants that mimicked a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which is well known as a naturally occurring pesticide. The result was China's own version of "Bt cotton," which by the year 2000 was planted on 20 percent of China's cotton acreage. Thanks to the genetically modified, pest-resistant cotton, China's farmers report that they have significantly reduced labor and the amount of pesticides applied in their cotton fields.

In an attempt to assess the current status and likely future of plant biotechnology in China, Rozelle and colleagues surveyed 29 of China's plant biotechnology research institutes and interviewed research directors of the major plant biotechnology programs. The study was conducted in collaboration with Fangbin Qiao, a graduate student in the UC Davis Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Jikun Huang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.