Dr. Ken Rietz
China is currently very much interested in food security to be independent of importing any essentials. For example, they have maintained a full year’s supply of wheat in storage, since 2018. Food imports in China increased from 3.9% in 2003 to 8.5% in 2022. The NIH estimates that the per capita wheat consumption of China will increase from 65.8 kg/year to 76 kg/year by 2030. Getting to food independence will be a challenge. But if they accomplish it, the effect on the global price of wheat will be enormous. First, let’s establish the baseline cost of wheat in the US, using the Fundamental Analytics platform.
How could China possibly increase sufficiently the amount of wheat they produce to reduce their imports to zero, or even begin to export wheat? Their answer is genetic modification. World scientists have finally deciphered the entire genome of wheat. That was no mean feat; wheat is a merger of several separate genetic lines, and its genome is five times as long as the human genome. Bread wheat was finally fully sequenced in 2018, and Chinese scientists have been working on ways to increase the size of wheat grains using CRISPR-Cas9 genetic modification techniques. Recently, they discovered a change that produces wheat berries that are both longer and heavier than the unmodified berries.
Does that mean that their goal has been reached? Not at all, but it is an encouraging first step. It will take years before they have verified this and prepared enough seeds with the modification. Besides that, making genetic modifications to a plant alters, in ways that are unpredictable, the way that the plant grows. For example, many GMO plants do not produce fertile seeds, so you have to keep recreating them each year. And other significant questions appear. Will it be more or less susceptible to variations in the weather? Will it be more or less resistant to diseases or pests? Will it be easier or harder to grow and harvest? Will the heavier berries be too heavy for the stem? Will it still make acceptable bread flour? Of course, all of these might be solved by more genetic modifications, but that could take dozens of years to do, if at all. This victory is encouraging, but not at all final.
If (or maybe when) this super-wheat becomes viable, how would it affect the global wheat market? Clearly, it would reduce the amount of wheat that China imports; this is China’s intention for the research. That, of course, would cause the global price of wheat to drop, eventually causing the entire global wheat production system to be reconfigured, mainly to grow alternate crops. But that is likely several years in the future.