I have heard that foreign spies steal military secrets, but you guys may not have thought that someone who stole our seeds for takeout was also sentenced to “Crime of illegally providing intelligence to overseas countries“.
Just yesterday, CCTV News posted a message on Weibo saying that our hybrid rice was stolen.
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The reason is that in order to make money, the general manager of a domestic agricultural science and technology company cooperated with foreign spies inside and outside, and sold the hybrid rice parent seeds that were banned for export to the spies at a high price for trial planting. As a result, it was discovered now that it will take more than a year. of prison food.
Digging deeper, I found that there are still a lot of “rat droppings” in the country, which have been illegally selling various high-quality seed resources in my country to overseas countries for a long time.
Anyway, as soon as this matter came out, the number one hot search was immediately arranged.
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Netizens were even more excited, and one of them could drown that old man with just a spit of spit.
Some people may want to ask, isn't it just a seed? What's there to steal?
You may not believe it, but selling seeds secretly is considered providing intelligence in our country and is illegal.
Because Article 11 of the “Seed Law of the People's Republic of China” clearly stipulates that the state enjoys sovereignty over germplasm resources. In other words, if you export seeds or cooperate with foreign institutions, you must report to the relevant departments for approval.
not to mention,What he stole was not ordinary seeds, but parent seeds.
You know, these are the “parents” of the seeds we can buy on the market. In a big way, this is also related to our food problem, so today I will chat with you about this matter.
Let me first tell you what parent seeds are.
According to academic terms, “Parental seeds are generally the first generation of seeds used for hybridization experiments, and their retained seeds will not cause trait separation.”
In human terms, it is a seed that can stably inherit good genes.
Specifically, parent seeds have screened high-quality seed characteristics, such as high yield, disease resistance, lodging resistance, etc., so parent seeds are often used to breed seeds for crop production.
Moreover, parental seeds can also be used for multi-generation selection and improvement. For example, the hybrid rice variety Shanyou 63 available on the market is a cross between Minghui 63 and Zhenshan 97A, and Minghui 63 is a hybrid between IR30 and IR30. It is a cross between Gui 630.
You may ask, can I just use seeds sold on the market for breeding?
not that simple.
One parent seed cannot have all the high-quality genes, so in order to breed high-quality varieties, researchers usually cross parent seeds with different high-quality traits.
For example, after hybridizing parental seeds that are resistant to lodging and resistant to lodging, a rice variety that is both high-yielding and resistant to lodging is developed.
But because genetic inheritance is too complicated, hybrid vigor is usually only shown in the F1 generation.
That is to say,If this rice variety is bred in the future, its F2 second generation and subsequent generations may experience separation of traits, and they may not necessarily carry the excellent genes of their parents. They may have all kinds of crooked melons and dates.
This is why hybrid rice seeds available on the market are generally disposable and have to be purchased again the next year.
It is precisely because of this genetic instability that if a spy just buys seeds from the market, there is a high probability that nothing will happen.
Therefore, compared to cultivating it yourself, directly stealing parent seeds for trial planting saves time and money, and you don’t have to worry about high-quality traits being diluted.
But the hard work of scientific researchers is being sold like this. How can you bear it?
You know, after Mr. Yuan discovered a high-yielding natural hybrid rice in the field, he kept looking for male-sterile plants.
At that time, Mr. Yuan proposed a “three-line method” for hybrid rice breeding, which included restorer lines, maintainer lines and sterile lines. To truly complete this closed loop, male sterile plants had to be found.
There were no machines in those days, so Mr. Yuan and his team used magnifying glasses to look at each plant in the field. Eight years had passed since they found “Yebei”, the first female parent of the legendary dominant hybrid rice.
It took eight years just to create a male-sterile strain. After that, it was necessary to transfer the “wild-stained” sterility gene to cultivated rice and cross it with other parent seeds. The entire breeding process was tedious and long.
All this time-consuming and labor-intensive work is actually related to whether so many of us have enough to eat and whether we can have enough to eat.
Although this incident will not have an impact on our food, after all, the parent seeds were stolen, but it will not affect our continued breeding.
But the reason why this matter is still counted as “providing intelligence for overseas countries” is that the seeds matter is essentially a national food security issue. No matter how small the risk is, you must guard it firmly.
Imagine if you don't protect and develop your own seeds properly, causing a country's food to be “stuck”, what do you think will be the consequences?
For example,In the past, there was an agricultural giant in the United States called Monsanto (now acquired by another giant, Bayer). They used a wild soybean seed we gave them to create genetically modified soybean seeds. As a result, they applied for more than 60 patents. Create a monopoly and sell at high prices.
During Argentina's debt crisis, Monsanto sold soybean seeds to Argentina at a false low price. Argentina thought it was getting a bargain and “contracted” 99% of its genetically modified soybeans to Monsanto.
But within two years, Monsan turned against him and threatened to cut off supply if Argentina refused.
More recently, India, Russia and the United Arab Emirates all said they would ban rice exports, which immediately pushed global rice prices to new highs.
Although our country is not worried about not being able to even eat rice, there is still a certain gap between seed resources and foreign countries.
Let’s look directly at the data. From 2019 to 2022, China’s seed import amount will be much higher than its export amount, and it will spend nearly 3 billion to buy seeds from outside every year.
In addition, our seeds are mainly imported from the United States, Chile and Denmark.
In other words, our dependence on imports of seeds is relatively high.
And many people may not know much about it, but seeds such as tomatoes, broccoli, carrots, onions and spinach have dominated the seed import list all year round.
I even suspect that the vegetables in the scrambled eggs with tomatoes and fried meat with carrots that I ate tonight may be of foreign origin.
For example, Sakata's seven-inch carrot seeds, supplied from Japan, were once sold for 13,000 per can.
There are also broccoli seeds that are sold for 18,000 yuan per pack, and cherry tomato seeds of a certain variety cost 8 yuan a small seed, or 4,000 yuan per gram.
If, as we mentioned before,Farmers have to buy new seeds after each season. In the end, a large part of the income earned from farming may be earned by selling seeds.
Not to mention that if strategic resources like rice and soybeans are choked, the so-called “food war” may not be a joke.
So in the final analysis, the reason why seeds are precious is because they are related to people's livelihood issues.
It is undeniable that our country’s seed industry started late and lags behind some developed countries in terms of research and development time and investment.
However, in the past few years, I have discovered that China has slowly started to substitute domestically produced seeds in the field of seeds.
For example, the new soybean variety “Dongsheng 118” developed by the Northeast Geography Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences can be planted in saline-alkali soil.
According to statistics, 98% of the top 10 rice, wheat, corn, and soybean varieties currently ranked in the country's promotion area are independently selected varieties.
Regarding the protection of seed intellectual property rights, the Seed Law, which has been revised several times, has also been emphasizing the protection of intellectual property rights in the seed industry and expanding the scope of protection of new plant variety rights.
Maybe soon, our farmer uncles will be able to buy low-priced, high-quality domestic seeds. By then, our dining tables will also be filled with all kinds of low-priced and delicious vegetables and fruits. Isn’t this going to take off immediately? ?