Over half the world's people eat rice every day. The work comes as farmers in industrialized countries, reacting to consumer resistance, are cutting back on acreage sown with genetically engineered crops. Bioengineered foods are created by splicing genes from the DNA of one organism and inserting it into another organism's genes. Such techniques have raised worries that genetically modified organisms could harm humans and animals, and may cause other vegetation to mutate or create other ecological damage. In developing countries like China, which supports a fifth of the world's population with only 7 percent of the world's arable land, the need to ensure that food production keeps pace with population growth has tended to outweigh worries about potential risks from genetically modified crops.
Rice is the world's most common staple food and China is the world's largest rice producer.
In 1999, it harvested 200.7 million tons out of a global rice harvest of 588.7 million tons. Chinese scientists at the Beijing news conference said the Monsanto research could, in four to five years, enable Chinese farmers to plant crops with much higher yields. They applauded the company's decision to provide data obtained through private research to the public domain. This will save us huge amounts of money and huge amounts of time. Monsanto officials would not say how much money the company spent on the rice genome project.